Ringbacks

And again the Telecom-industry develops a micro service: Ringbacks. These are:

This service replaces that traditional ringing or beeping sound a caller hears before the phone user answers with a 30-second clip of music or sound effects.

The voice service gets slowly more intelligent. You can already imagine various improvements on this service. Change the ringback based on CLI. Commercial ringbacks? An advertising ringback network?

[inspiration: MocoNews]

Peppercoin

Peppercoin has announced version 2.0 of their solution. I have been trying to understand what their solution does. It seems to be mainly a product, which the merchant has to install and integrate into his website. This part can also be outsourced to Peppercoin, which then offers a hosted application service.
The offer a micropayment solution. As they ask 10 cents per transaction, the minimal payment is some 2 dollars. I assume this is a better deal than offered by the creditcard companies otherwise their solution is not interesting. The solution of Peppercoin is based on payment aggregation. Peppercoin aggregated all payments and reduces it to a single payment per buyer. I guess this only works well when their network is large enough.

I see the advantage that Peppercoin offers, but why can the Credit Card companies not do something similar? And aren’t they already doing something similar? My money gets transferred only once the per month. The rest is administration and overhead. And that is where you might reduce costs. Anyway I am not sure I understand it.

[inspiration: PaidContent.org]

Internet Dildo

As was expected the porn industry invented a remote controlled dildo, which can be operated remotely through Internet. I guess this is only the first version. Other models, bluetooth operated, whatever will be around the corner. This porn client can be integrated in a chat, webcam supported communications service.

But I guess other remotely operated clients will be coming as well. Youth and children toys are also interesting markets.

[inspiration: Xeni @ Wired]

Webapps

John Gruber has an entry about webapps, which made me thinking. Basically he defines web-apps as applications that you do not have to install. Web-apps are used through a web-browser. The user interface of web-apps is usually below-par. The interfaces between web-apps are almost dissimilar, but the user does not seem to care. Web-apps are often very easy to use and can be used anywhere.

He however does not distinguish between apps that need an online (read Internet) connection and the ones that don’t. Some of the classic apps do not really need an online connection (Photoshop, BBEdit, QuarkExpress). But these are also highly advances applications, which really use the advantage of being local. Online apps are often much more simple and do really need the advantage of being local on the PC. Thus application complexity might be a differentiator. This might also show that many PC-applications are just to complex. They want to use all features of the PC. The popularity of Apple’s iApps does show something similar. People want to use simple, easy to use apps.

He claims that people do not care about the quality of an app’s user interface. I am not sure. Apple’s iApps show different. I think that quality and complexity are fighting here. Complexity lowers the quality and people move to web-apps.

The maintenance arguments favour the web-apps indeed. No installation, no backups worries, no storage worries, no downtime, etc. With web-apps you outsource your system management troubles, which will be a great advantage for many users. Some webapps might even have services not possible in normal apps (really??) and are foremost portable. You can use them anywhere, on any PC, with any browser (hopefully) and with an platform (more and more). Although the latter is only an advantage to nomadic users.

It shows that for the same service a whole range of implementations are possible and required by the users dependent on their needs. An email-service shows this very well. Advanced users use a local applications, moderate users use a web-based application, nomadic users change between various platforms and browsers to access an online service and very nomadic users might only use the SMS/MMS feature of a mobile phone. So many people, so many flavours.

Videoconferencing from the sky

Two Apple employees tried videoconferencing on a Lufthanse plane using the broadband ISP service. As you guessed it turned out pretty well.

Maybe this will not be available for long, now that the US is so nervous about terrorism (Jason Kottke).

Ringtones Terminology

Ringtones is a perfect example of a (publishing) service that has created a load of new terminology. Such terminology will help defining a new service category. Ringtonia attempts to create a list of this terminology.

[inspiration: MoCo.News]

Funny Billing

Paid Content reports that the Glastonbury festival sells song excerpts for 4.0 UK pounds (very expensive). The interesting thing is how they have to solve the billing. They send three reverse charged text messages in order to get their money.

It shows that you should not limit the price of a text message. People will find a way around it. But also that SMS is one of the few ways to bill someone, although I assume that this way of billing is not possible with every SMS provider. Especially the reverse charging will not be implemented everywhere. But what happens when things go wrong? Can anybody send reverse charged messages? Do I have to accept them as a user (I assume yes)?

Personalized RSS-feeds

Edward Breedveld had the idea of creating personalised web-feeds. An interesting idea. Might replace email? For publishing services it can be interesting. Ad personalised ads to a feed. Next is a backchannel to the publisher to show whether you liked an entry or not. And the publisher might learn something. I am not sure that the personalisation of publishing services is any good that I would want that, but it is an idea. It will make RSS a totally different way of publishing.

[inspiration: Adam Curry]

Weblogs.com

Allready a lot has been said about the sudden closing down of weblogs.com, a service maintained by Dave Winer. And it was to tempting not to comment on this.

First some comments on the provider side. David Winer was absolutely in his right to close the service down. He did not ask for any money, it was a free service. It was a service maintained by a single person.  It was however a service with some 4000 customers (I think). If you have so many ‘customers’ then you moved yourself into some obligations. I do not know, but I hope that Dave made it clear upfront that any customer was using the service to his own risk. That there were no guarantees for continuous service or uptime. Although I do not think that you can blame Dave on pulling the plug, it was free after all, I think he should not have offered a service to so many users. So many users blur the lines what you are doing. I assume that this is also due to the fact that the service was moved from Userland to Dave’s premises. I guess he wanted to be nice, but that turned out to be unrealistic. That event should have been a good opportunity to wind the service down. It surely is a lesson for anybody that intends to offer a service on its own. Make it clear to your customers what you are offering and what the guarantees are. But do not let this stop you and experiment with new services. This is what makes Internet so interesting.

And then the user side. The users have been enjoying the free service for years. It even seems that they became dependent on it. But why stay with Dave’s service? Did you not know that it had become a one man operation? Were you not willing to pay for the service? Why not if it was so important to you? And make backups? It just sounds silly for the users. Anyway I hope that Dave will have time to give them their data and all turns out well. But next time be warned if you subscribe to a service. Also look at the service provider. Who is he (or they)? How are they doing financially? Can you really expect a future? If not, then take your precautions. You and only you are responsible for your own data.

By the way, I pay for my hosting (Futurequest) and Blog tools (pMachine). I am however very lazy in making backups.

Search Directory update

At last I have updated a part of the directory. It is only a small part, but it is a beginning. I looked closely at the Search Tele-Services category. I redefined all subcategories and evaluated all services that I had in the database. I recategorised each service and created new descriptions.

Next step is publishing the corresponding category description. I created most of the text, but I have to read it again and correct errors.

I guess it will take a few weeks before that is done. But I should not make any promises in public

Mobule

Mobule is an experimental matching service, which uses a Bluetooth enabled phone. Every 60 seconds the phone scans for other Bluetooth phones in its vicinity. Once it detects such a phone, it’s ID is sent by SMS to the Mobule service. If the ID is available on the this service and the profiles between the ID’s match a picture message is sent to both ID’s. The users can then interact if they want to.

[inspiration: The Social Software Weblog]

TextPA

Scheduled texting is what textPA offers to their customers. This service allows users to send SMS messages at a specific time and date. This is also known as a reminder service. The service costs 10 pence per reminder.

[inspiration Engadget]

OpenReview

Recently I saw an entry on Marc Canters log on OpenReviews. As I started publishing some simple reviews on my own log, I got interested in this subject again. What would I like to get out of this? I put some thoughts here on such a standard, which could be come an interesting fabric of a wide set of services. I did not read any of the OpenReview documents and comments yet, as I wanted to form an opinion first.

First I need some kind of definition of what I think an OpenReview is. For me it is a personal comment on something in the real (or virtual) world. And this ‘something’ can be anything: a book that I read, a DVD I saw, a museum I visited, a hotel I stayed in, a computer I bought, etc. It is something that I have formed an opinion on. This can even be a news event, a website, a comment on a blog item, an open review whatever. The central idea is that OpenReview is about something that can be well defined and is unique. This unique something is an extremely important of a Open Review.

An OpenReview is something personal. It is mine, I formulated the review. The review might have been solicited or not. It is a personal opinion, which is not coming from some advocacy group and is not supported by any group. As it is personal I hold some copyright over it. I determine how it is published and can be user. The Creative Commons might come handy here. I admit thought that the personal thing can become a bit shady.

The Open of OpenReview has to do with the publishing of the review. I might publish a review on my website, on my blog and make it part of a RSS-feed. Publishing makes my review available for the world. Anybody van see it and can do with it what he wants as long as he abides to my Creative Commons request.

There will be thousands of reviews about the same item spread around the web. And then syndication and aggregation comes into place. If I comment on a specific blog entry, I will be added to the comment-list through either the PingBack or TrackBack mechanism. In this case I created a review for a unique item, which can be identified by an unique URL. And the original author of the blog entry may syndicate my comments.

If I create a review for a book for instance it, there is no clear place where my comments should appear. On Amazon is a good guess, but there are more places where book reviews are aggregated. And each of these places is free to use my comment under the restrictions that I specified. One could envision a review aggregator service which gathers all these reviews (Google anyone?) and offers the combined reviews to review publishers as a web-service. This aggregation centers around the type of review, i.e book review, DVD review, Restaurant review etc. In order to find these reviews, a review must be easily found either through good tags around the review or specific RSS-feeds (review blogrolls).

Central to a review is the subject the review is about. This subject should be uniquely identifiable. For books the Amazon URL is usually used. But for other subjects it is not so clear what should be used. For products the UPC of EAN-code can be used as unique identifier. Creating this identification structure is the most central and most difficult thing of all.

But let’s start with books, but try to invent something that can be expanded to other subjects, items, whatever.

FutureMe

A service, which allows you to send an email to Yourself (only?) in the future. The delivery email must lie at least a week in the future. They say that they are not a reminder service.

It is possible to subscribe to the service. This allows you to view and edit the mails that you submitted. You can also send your email in public, so that other may view what you have written. However you can not view such public emails directly, i.e. find the email sent by a specific person. You can only step through or access these public emails.

It is a fun service. The public emails remind me of entries in a diary, but then you do not get a reminder.

[inspiration: David Brake]

MySpace.com

I started checking out Myspace.com. This is yet another place where you can store your personal profile. The primary goal is again meeting other people by inviting your friends to join. They have various communication facilities to have people communicate with each other: a blog, bulletin board, groups, email, classifieds, instant messaging. There is also a place to listen to music or play games. An interesting feature is the possibility to rate other members based on their pictures.

Why are these services packaged into a single service. Most of these services can be offered as stand alone services. The integrating factor seems to be mainly the identification and profile of a user. This allows to show a profile of the user next to his user id and it allows to start communicating through email or instant messaging. Only the rating service uses the profiles in a more extensive way.

I still do not get these kind of services. It reminds me a lot of community sites and/or affinity portals. The main problem I have with these sites is that they are so general. They are not centred around any of my interests. I rather go a specific site to meet friends. Then I have something to talk about.

[inspiration: Marc Canter]