I grew up in Norway and quite literally skied to school as a small child. So it figures that I just LOVE the winter Olympics. Give me the 50k cross country ski race, 10,000 meter speed skating, or yes even ski-jumping ahead of the World Series playoffs or a Superbowl game any day. Where you may just see two guys with big thighs and body-speedos skating around and around in an ice rink, I see riveting split second excitement that brings back fond memories from my childhood.
It has always been interesting to me how much social and cultural backgrounds ends up coloring our perspectives and shaping our interests. One of the things I really look forward to with Plum is to discover the things that other people are passionate about. We are cranking to get ready for ETech in San Diego in just over a week, so I did not have much time to follow the Olympics this year, but I did use Plum to collect a few articles, pictures and some snippets that I though memorable. Nothing like checking out the latest on the biathlon as a part of debugging.
You may or may not share my fondness for the icy games coming to a head today, but you naturally have your own set of interests and passions. I hope that Plum becomes a place where you can collect, share and connect some of those interests and perhaps discover some delightful, crazy, fun and useful stuff that others are collecting in the process.
-hans peter
I know this may be considered heresy to some in these circles, but I don’t need a social network. I have a great social network already. It consists of a relatively small group of good friends and family. Of course I socialize with the people I work with too. Beyond that I am not looking to connect with lots of new people all the time. Perhaps I should also point out that I test pretty far over on the "i" (for "introvert") scale on the Myers Briggs test.
What I do need and want is to connect or even socialize with knowledge, topics and information. I soak that stuff up. I may even occasionally want to converse a bit with the people behind the ideas and information I like, but that’s secondary. What I want is to constantly discover new ideas, new restaurants, new places to go, new anti-oxidants… And then I want ways to remember and remix the stuff I discover and like for myself and for others too.
When we talk excitedly about social networks, I think we need to differentiate between social networks of people and social networks of ideas and information. They are different, they serve different purposes and the are (mostly) used by different people.
I really like the idea of social knowledge. I want to hook up to your topics and interest, not to you. Sorry, nothing personal.
-hans peter
Hans Peter and I will be at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies conference March 6-9 in San Diego. The program looks fantastic. I can’t wait.
Hans Peter is speaking in one of the “High Order Bits” sessions on Wednesday morning. He will among other things show our APIs. We will be handing out lots of details on what we’ve got so if you are interested in learning about our open, user-definable attribute based data store, the associated web services we offer and see some cool examples of how it works, come hear the talk or track us down.
The engineering team is at it around the clock to get things ready so we can hand out accounts at the conference too. We have been working on some really fun stuff for collecting and sharing code, bugs, etc. so stay tuned.
Hope to see you there.
-margaret
Where should we draw the line on collecting and sharing? What can and should be collectable and what should not? Technically we can let people collect and share anything digital using Plum. It’s just bits. Storage is becoming cheaper by the minute and bandwidth, while not free, is available on demand. I wrote about the concept of being "sharing friendly" back in December in Digital Sharing: An Unavoidable Force (please ignore the silly mug-shot).
In another article, Is Copyright Wrong? I look at how current copyright law is out of step with the click-n-grab digital reality. I also try to contrast what Yahoo! and Google are doing when they cache pages and what the Internet Archives does as they snapshot the Web relative to current legal definitions of copyright. The recent Nevada court desicions rejecting the claim that Google’s cache violates copyright law is very encouraging. More about that here on Lessig’s blog.
-hans peter
Besides the great energy and atmosphere at DEMO, here are a few of the things that stood out for me:
Ugobe’s Pleo - How can you not like a little green dinosaur that wags its tail and looks like it’s smiling at you.
Riya - If their face recognition search technology really works at scale this deserves to be put in the breakthrough technology column.
Moobella - Wonder which Silicon Valley rich guy will be the first to install an ice cream factory in a box - a big box - in their home.
Kosmix - Categorizes search results in vertical domains. This could add a lot of contextual value to search. We’ve been thinking a lot about how people categorize stuff at Plum and these guys have developed an elegant first solution.
Yahoo! Photos - Looks like the OddPost DNA might be truly infusing itself at Y!. Demonstrating some very nice AJAX UI stuff.
Krugle - I worked with the founder Ken Krugler at Apple Japan in 1987. One of the smartest engineers I have known. I cannot imagine a software engineer on the planet who won’t want this!
Blurb - Super desktop UI and a hot product to match. I know where my Christmas presents are coming from next year.
-hans peter
