Timo Heuers Weblog

After I switched my domain weeks ago, I now have access to my English blog, too. Will be putting some more posts up the next days. Also theme will change (I hope…). Stay tuned!

will be switching this domain the next days.. maybe some failures and errors! sorry for that!

When I was attending BarCampBerlin2 yesterday, I went to an English session called “OpenID for beginners”. Lukas Rosenstock, member of the OpenID Foundation Europe, talked about how OpenID was created and how to use it.

Here are a few statements, notices and thoughts:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dckgqp4z_13cz39fw

Everybody’s writing about OpenSocial, Google’s new initiative to build applications for social networks, comparable to the Facebook Apps.

Ning, an American micro Social Network creator, is a part of the project together with some other notable names. Ning’s founder, Marc Andreesen, who also founded Netscabe, explains the concept in this way:

# “Containers” — social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and…

# “Apps” — applications that want to be embedded within containers — for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide

Andreesen says, Facebook is using proprietar languages and APIs called FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language). OpenSocial will be using HTML and Javascript!

I think OpenSocial is the right step into the things I mentioned in my article “Introducing the future of Social Networking“. I think it’s necessary for Social Networks to open for third party developers and let users add apps to their profiles.

A few days after the deal, Myspace joined the alliance.

And I think I like the project’s slogan: “The Web is better when it’s social”. That could be the slogan for the new Web which is open. I don’t know how to call, but maybe we could call it Open Web. It’s

Ah, to mention the headline in my text: I don’t think Facebook will die. I think they are the innovator for the Open Web - they were initiating a reform! And the reform is changing the Social Networks.

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!