Timo Heuers Weblog

I bought my first Mac some days ago and I totally love it. Ok, not totally, but I love it.

I ordered Leopard yesterday and hope Apple will send it soon

Yeah, it doesn’t only seem working, it is working!

Google, yes, the “Don’t be evil” company, become stronger and stronger. After they took over Jaiku a few days ago, I read a great article about how strong Google could be, if they wanted. It’s by Michael Agger and called “Google’s Evil Eye“. He shows, what Google knows about you, even your voice.

After I read an article about the same written for Mashable, I blogged about it over in my German blog.

Google knows our voice, as I wrote above. They will know a lot of more things through the Jaiku acquisition. For example, “what you’re doing on your phone, what other applications you may be using, where you’re current location is, your social interaction, and if you’re available to chat, the openness of it all may be scary to some.”

Imagine what you will let them know while using the announced Google Phone!!

Wouldn’t it be better, if we had our data such as gender, name, address and those things in one single place? In my imagination, a future service will offer to save our data in that single place and Social Networks like Facebook, XING and LinkedIn just extract the data they need from this source (for example current jobs, awards, also friends at other networks so you can synchronize). The advantage is, you know, that you don’t have to fill out lots of forms. You just have to fill out one form and the Social Networks will immediately get the data from there.

A kind of single data place would be useful. It could be hosted by a trustable company or self-hosted (like NoseRub already does it). Self-hosting is of course the better choise, because you have full access to all activities going with your data. You trust yourself more than a person you don’t know! Friends, gender, former jobs, current job, favorite music and more - everything’s hosted by yourself. A network that needs your gender, your name, (favorite) username and your favorite music just accesses to the single data place and gets the data they need. No need to fill out more than one form anymore! Also the network can access to your friends (their email addresses are also collected at your single data place) and check, if they are already registered. That’s called synchronizing. Maybe your friend Peter is already registered, so you can easily add him to be your friend. But your friend John isn’t there. You can easily invite him. It’s like the feature to synchronize your e-mail addresses as some Social Networks already do it today. But it’s easier for you and takes less time!

But every network has some data, which is its special field, for example “favorite destination” at travel communities. That information isn’t in your single data place, so you have to fill out what it is. Afterwards you should be able to export the special data and import it at your single data place, so that another social network who needs “favorite destination” doesn’t have to ask you anymore and automatically imports it from your single data place. It knows it, because your single data place knows it, after you imported the data.

You can also designate what data you want to share. If a network asks for name, gender and sexual likings, you don’t have to give access to your sexual likings. You just edit the checkmark and uncheck sexual likings. That’s a new way how to give away data. The Social Networks
are no longer able to charge the information they want, they now have to wait for your choice which data you want to share with them. That’s a fundamental change of data storing! I think that’s neccessary for the great idea of single data place.

An advantage is that if you settle to another city, you just have to edit your single place data “adress” and every social network requiring the address knows, that you settled. No need to nerve-racking hours of changing!

You probably realized that I don’t have the view of a technician. I am a user and I am a person with tons of feedback. I just brainstormed and noticed the things I thought about. I don’t know how to realize all this, but maybe Microformats would be a cool place to start. Also OpenID could be helpful in trying to realize this a way. They have built the needed infra structure for this.

In my opinion the future of Social Networks is, that you decide, what data you let to know and that you have the access to all of your data, not the Social Networks! And there are already solutions doing exactly or nearly that. The change has already begun…

It’s one of the breaking news on twitter right now! Jaiku got acquired by Google and confirmed that just a few minutes ago, as Mashable writes. Also Google confirms on their corporate blog.

Mashable writes: “In a world where price is no object for Google, it’s surprising they would opt for Jaiku and not Twitter.”

Congrats to the Finnish guys, who really rock!

It is amazing! The second BarCamp in Germany’s capital Berlin, which will take place the weekend before Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, has opened it’s doors. 66 places reserved in less than an hour. It’s great!

And it’s also good for you my English readers, because it’s the first international BarCamp here in Germany. Official language are English and German. I’ll be there! Let me know, if you go and we’ll met.

I already blogged about the current Web 3.0 discussion ransomed by Mahalo (which seems to be a great project by the way) founder Jason Calacanis.

But I think one of the best definitions is made by Niva Spivak from Radar Networks, who writes:

Web 3.0, in my opinion is best defined as the third-decade of the Web (2010 - 2020), during which time several key technologies will become widely used. Chief among them will be RDF and the technologies of the emerging Semantic Web. While Web 3.0 is not synonymous with the Semantic Web (there will be several other important technology shifts in that period), it will be largely characterized by semantics in general.

Nova created a very interesting graphic, which shows us, that Web 3.0 starts 2010 in his opinion.

What’s in my mind is, how people will notice, when Web 3.0 is all over the internet. I don’t know how to differ between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 in practise. Of course, we can speculate about what Web 3.0 will be, but who will identify it, if Web 3.0 is here?

I have a friend, Lutz Thielmann, who visited one of the Lunch 2.0’s I organized, and he worked a long time in Semantic Web sector. I asked him for a book suggestion for beginners. Would be cool to read a good book about that. But, hum, I am totally overload with books. Here are some books to review, some classical books which I want to read (for example Kafka, a great author) and I’m currently reading Robert Scoble’s “Naked Conversations” and have a lot of critism most for the German translators.

In an interview with David Wilkinson, who is running the Techzi Network, I got asked about what I think what Web 3.0 will be. It was in January. I answered, that Jajah and Jaxtr will be big players in Web 3.0 and Open Source will be a big part of Web 3.0, but as I think today, I failed.

Today, 10 month after the mentioned interview, I think Web 3.0 is all about portable Social Networks, Semantic Web, WebOS and maybe Micro Blogging (I’m not really sure about that). But I think, Web 3.0 will flood the Web earlier than we can imagine.

“Free Burma” is an initiative to help Burma. It became popular in Germany, because the German blog god, may I call him so?, blogged about it: Robert Basic himself. He’s also one of the contact persons as well as Dario Salvelli. There’s also a wiki explaining what they want to do. Publish only one post on October 4th. Title: “Free Burma”. Of course you are able to add pictures.

I think it’s a great idea. I join the group!