The Change the Web Challenge
I have to admit that I was hasty in my decision on how to participate and what to build: I did not  look anything else apart from the API itself. I ended up paying in hard currency for this haste: lot of wasted time! Because, I, almost from the first moment, resolved in building a WordPress plugin with the Social Actions API.
I started coding and in a couple of days I was done only to find out that the Social Actions site already had such a plugin, a very well written one and definitively much better than mine.
Almost in panic, because the time was running out, I started thinking what could I build instead. I turned down the option of building a better plugin, because it was not only a matter of quality, but of originality too.
My mistake made me research better what was already in place and found that web site widgets were rather abundant. Except.. Except for wordpress.com where javascript, iframe and flash widgets are not allowed to run.

I remembered then the days I was trying to circumvent this limitation by employing Yahoo Pipes and the WordPress RSS widget. I did not find something similar revolving around the social actions API, and, despite this being a pretty simple solution (even though it took me a lot of hours to remember how pipes worked and catch up with the new features), I found it appealing since it would potentially be useful to the 7mio or so WordPress.com users. So I built a pipe which could be configured by users to retrieve actions theiy were interested in, in the form of an RSS feed (you can see it in action in the bottom of the sidebar of this blog) .

I  barely  had finished when I discovered that even this was not a good plan because Wordpess had committed to adopt the best plugin the challenge produced! This rendered my pipe obsolete and there was no time to go back in rebuilding my plugin. I did then what I should have done from the very beginning: looked at the ideas people had already posted in the relevant page and noticed that some kind of map would be a nice thing to produce.

With a few additions to the pipe and thanks to the Pipes Location Extractor, I managed finally to pull out something. Not much, but something.

Leasons learned

Thinking back my  experience, I realized that the whole thing looked pretty much as a  failed  startup.

I made the mistakes I wouldn’t have made if I was starting a business: I did not make a proper market research, I did  not check  what the users really desired, I ignored the opportunities and the threats… In sort, I got myself entangled in programming instead of building a product. How many such startup efforts had I scoffed in the past?

One step ahead.

From startups, my thought  jumped to social entrepreneurship only to realize the obvious: whatever you build,  the rules are the same. It is just the kind of returns that differ. In social entrepreneurship it’s not about making money. It’s about making a difference, aiding people and, ultimately, changing the world.

The new 80/20 rule

One more step ahead.

If social entrepreneurship mechanics are the same  with pro profit entrepreneurship why people who are experts in these mechanics do not do both? The easy answer is that entrepreneurs are mobilized by greed and not by human solidarity.

But I believe the truth is different. They just haven’t thought  about it!

I know many people that could do both and if they don’t, it is because they focus relentlessly on the success of their pro profit efforts and spend all their time there. And for some stages of entrepreneurship this is not only inevitable, but a prerequisite.

But then, there are so many other people that have tasted success, have turned into angel investors, have embarked on a second, or third or forth startup effort, while their bank account  has enough for the rest of their lives.

What if these people applied to themselves the famous 80/20 Google rule?

80% of their time and effort spent on their pro profit ventures and 20% on social entrepreneurship.

Think of the vast amount of talent, genious, power, skill and  resources that would go into this 20%. I am convinced that even a fraction of it would suffice to change the world.

Image via Wikipedia

The comparison of the current financial crisis with the thirties is a commonplace for bloggers and mainstream media alike. Yet, extremely few, if any, of those making the comparison were born, lived through or near the time of the big crash in 1929. And as history teaches us that history does not teach people anything, the comparison of the current crisis to the 1929 one, is just a matter of impressions. We will not be able to know and understand the implication of the current crisis for years. Which is also a generous premise, since, even today, we do not understand the causes of 1929 crisis.

Another commonplace comparison is the one with the .com collapse. The parallels here run truly scarce, as very few of the  web 2.0 companies made it to the stock market to get exorbitant valuations. So where is the comparison? To the fact that the good times for web2.0, meaning capital flow, copycat financing, building a new venture in a matter of days, etc,  will eventually end. And  end it will, there is no doubt about it, since the melt down of the big financial corporations will dry up the rest of the economy.

Yet, like a forest fire that helps a forest regenerate, this dry up will put the vigor of web 2.0 into a test. And like in the .com era, Darwin will see himself proven right once more, and the fittest will survive.

I can’t help reminding myself of all the articles I read in the late ’90s that were doupting the prospect of Amazon‘s survival.  Amazon is now an undeniable e-commerce king. It has also  gone far beyond that, transforming itself into the main web services provider, the behemoth of cloud computing.

A similar thing will happen to web 2.0: the most valuable companies, those adept and well adapted, those with sound business models and practices will survive to see themselves the business royalty of tomorrow. The crisis may take away some money capital from them, but will also provide the with new cheap human capital, less competitors and a market that settles around them.

Is web 2.0 declared dead? Good! Now it can start living.

Yesterday I met Jason Calacanis. He was attending the Stream 2008 unconference in Athens,Greece  and the opportunity was ideal.
The meeting wasn’t by chance though. I learned about his coming through some Twitter friends and sent him an email asking for an interview.
He counter proposed that I should go to Stream and videotape the whole session he would be leading on Friday afternoon.
It didn’t take long for me to agree. I run there with my colleague Spyros, and recorded the whole session, plus an extra 10 minutes interview.

These are the two videos that follow. People interested in startups, especially now, under the heavy shadow of the looming financial crisis, should definitely watch the first one, where Jason relates his recent experiences from the Techcrunch50 event.In brief, the things covered are the following:

• Observations and conclusions from Techcrunch50

• zero cost startups and microfinancing
• zombie startups
• the end of servers
• venture investment in the form of hosting
• oversourcing of crowds
• countries that generate startups: US, Israel, Korea, Japan and China.
• risk aversion and role of negative press in Europe

The bullets might look a bit cryptic, but watch the video and you’ll understand.

The sound is a bit harsh in the first video as there is a lot of background noice (mostly coming from the air conditioning), but voices are audible.

The second is a bit more personal as Jason talks about his Greek roots and Mahalo.

The past few days there has been a lot of buzz for  short urls.
First, it was the announcement that tinyurl will support custom aliases for shortened urls, to make them more readable and memorable (see here).

Yesterday, it was the launching of a new short url service, bit.ly, that brings lots of new features hailed by many users.
As I read through Marshall Kirkpatrick’s excellent write up of bit.ly in RWW, I felt that a kind of injustice was done on my friend Panos who has developed a similar service (urlborg) some time ago, but has not received similar attention yet.

Trying not to be partial though, I decided to make a comparison table, to, first, see for myself, if what I was feeling was justified, and then post it here, for others to see too.

As one can see from the table above, with the exception of the planned features of bit.ly, urlborg, stands pretty well against it.
As a matter of fact, urlborg is better in history tracking because, by emplyoing the Google account mechanism, it can keep track of all short urls created and/or clicked by a certain user.
Urlborg does not support thumbnails, but offsets the lack of this feature by other (mobile page preview, coupled map urls, media player) which, depending on the use, might be more important to a user.
Referral tracking is something missing from urlborg and it should be there. But the support of short domains prevails in significance to the support of custom urls, (or aliases in the case of tinyurl).

From the above, I think that my gut feeling is justified and that urlborg should receive some more attention. It deserves it.

Plurk, the recently launched microblogging service, with the uncommon timeline interface, and the features considered by many as childish (: funny emoticons, karma, and karma related ‘creatures’) is not exactly the favorite of A-list bloggers. Despite  the considerable amount of people that joined it, plurk remains in the shadow of the more ‘serious’ twitter and friendfeed. As if it had to be considered an alternative to them! Whatever utility one can get from such services is up to the community that will form around it.

Having said this, I must recognise that the ease of making  threaded discussions, the notifications for new updates, which, unlike twitter, is inherent in plurk, and the toys (:emoticons, etc) available, predispose people to behave differently. So most, actually, use it for chatting. And this is not bad at all, provided one knows what to expect.

It would take just a couple of changes though, to make it a serious twitter competitor: strip all the funny stuff and replace the timeline interface with the one used in the mobile version. Ok, maybe SMS too, although I do not consider it a serious possibility for plurk. Since one thread ca easily reach 100 responses, it would be almost a martyrdom to get so many updates through SMS.

Plurk has not published any API so far, but there is an unofficial one. The lack of an API and the inclusion of auto refresh in the web application, has not motivated developers to create add-ons, twitter style. Adobe Air apps, search engines, statistics, special feeds or hash tags etc. are simply not there.

Not entirely though. Hellotxt and ping.fm offer posting possibilities and one can easily get the plurk feed in friendfeed in the form of a blog feed. There is also twistermc for firefox and maybe some more.

Recently I came across a site that is dedicated to plurk statistics: Plurkmania (A twitter friend introduced me to it. Many thanks!).

Since there is very little information on the site (although, in a previous visit, I am almost sure that  I saw that a 24 year old was the site creator) I can only assume that it is using the unofficial API to get the stats out.

Yet, the stats collected are interesting, not for plurk itself only, but for comparisons also.

Plurkmania allows ordering plurk users by:

• Karma
• Location
• Friends
• Fans
• Friends & Fans
• Plurks
• Responses
• Plurks & Responses
• # Recruited

There are also some extra stats for

• Gender
• Relationship
• Creature (!)
• Theme

but with numbers that do  add up to the plurk population, not even close. This discrepancy may be attibuted to users not filling information as far Gender and  Relationship are concerned  but cannot be explained for Creature and Theme which should be applicable to all.

Of course, one, by entering his plurk name, can get personal statistics too .

Mine follow.

(At the time of writing, I discovered through this that I am the top plurk recruiter for Greece -although the number is really small- and that I rank 25th for the whole world).

In a sense, like plurk, plurkmania is amusing. Check the rank by fans, for instance. Leo Laporte is nr 1, but his karma is a mediocre 31.64. Likewise for Scoble (#2 and 24.74 respectively). Darren Rowse does pretty well on both though (#10, 74.47).

This is explainable. A-list bloggers can easily attract followers in any new service, but apparently they don’t care for posting in plurk.

Plurkmania can be a success. Whenever and wherever there is a possibility for people to rank high, they come and look. Same for plurk rankings, provided that plurk will be around for long.

Update: Ok, I found the creator. And he gives some important info too. In two days, we should be expecting the official launch.

Update 2: Plurkmania  is on Mashable. If it was this post that helped plurkmania to make it to mashable, then I am certainly glad!

Related:

http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2008/07/while_alisters_hype_friendfeed.html

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/06/06/playing-with-plurk/

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/06/02/plurk-twitter-clone-or-heir-to-twitters-throne/

http://thenextweb.org/2008/06/02/are-you-already-plurking/

OpenCoffee Greece and Techcrunch UK organized an event by the sea, in a very summer-like and relaxed place (as you can testify by the short video below). A bunch of Greek startups had the opportunity to present themselves and become a little bit more known to a larger puplic.
From my small participation in the preparations, I happen to know that it was arranged and organized in record time: only a month from decision to the actual event.

An enthusiastic crowd of around 200-250 people managed to gather at Bocca Beach, and follow patiently the presentations to the end, despite the long delay caused by the failure of some sound equipment, the nervousness of the presenters and the constant beer distractions.

I managed to attend too, despite (or against) my raging flu, and I do not regret it.

Mike Butcher, of Techcrunch UK, kicked off the event, presenting the general trends regarding VCs, startups and investments in Europe. The whole thing can be summed up in one sentence: the future of the European startups is mobile, something that I strongly believe also.

I will not go through the startup presentations, one by one. I will blog about them in the near future.
For those interested, here is a quick list of the startups.

Blymee (more)
Photo Frame Show (more)
Slideflickr (more)
Sojourner (more)
Transifex (more)
Askmarkets (more)
Wadja (more)
Qualia (more)
Product Madness (more)

The greek budding startup ecosystem was one of the reasons I decided to blog in English. Technology, internet and startups are, by definition, global things and English in the lingua franca of nowdays.
So, stay tuned! More startups to come.

Soundsnap is not a music site. All one can find there is plain sounds that can be used for special sound effects, remix etc.

It is a simple, clean site, with community features. Created by some sound pros, it is dedicated to uploading and sharing sounds. It is ad and sponsor supported.

A quick look reveals thousands of sounds available for downloading which one can listen to with the available flash player.

The site is build with drupal and a few add ons but  it is not the ‘coolness’ of the underlying CMS that matters here.

The only thing I have a slight objection for, is that the terms of use allow only public domain material to be uploaded. A creative-commons-also approach could make Soundsnap more attractive to contributors.
Nevertheless, it is useful as it is.