Month: May 2009

Introducing Zzub.it

Zzub.it - Home Page
Last Sunday we launched the a new version of the Zzub.it site, the first project built on PagesPlus 2.0.
Zzub.it is a community dedicated to word of mouth marketing, the new site sports many social networking features (and we have many more in the pipeline).
From the technical POV, besides the “traditional” aggregation and layout tools of PagesPlus, these are the key features offered by the ERM architecture:
  • user management (sign-up, sign-up on invite, profile management, password recovery)
  • brands section (feed aggregation, become fan)
  • products section (become fan, commenting, voting)
  • campaign section (invitation, join, comment, feedback, word of mouth reports, surveys)
  • relationship between users (friends, relatives, contacts, facebook contacts synchronization)
  • messaging system (both internal in/out box management and bridget to email, twitter, sms)
  • user private and public personal pages (ranking, activity stream)
It’s a very interesting job, and we enjoy working with the Zzub team. There is still a lot of work to do, and we are working on many details of the back-end of the system, but so far we are very please with PagesPlus 2.0 flexibility, the speed of development and the performances that we are experiencing.

The news of RSS death might be exaggerated

While Steve Gillmor is declaring RSS dead, buried by the emergence of the real time web, I was thinking about the course of events as far as content authoring and fruition are concerned.

At the very beginning there was WWW, an application designed to author and browse web pages, all in one. But right after that, browsers evolved leaving behind the authoring part, which became the domain of a whole bunch of “professional” applications, separating content authoring from content creation in different tools.

Later, at the beginning of blogging, Radio UserLand would bring together again content authoring and reading: you would use Radio to write on your own blog, and you would use Radio built in browser to read what other people would publish on their sites, using RSS.

But then, again, authoring and reading tools separated these tasks: WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger etc. are authoring tools, while Google Reader, NetNewsWire, Bloglines, etc. are just readers.

Also if they do provide some degree of openness, Twitter, Facebook and most other SN we see today have brought again together the authoring and reading features, within the same applications.

While having the two features united makes a lot of sense to bootstrap a service, it looks like so far they ended up being separated by vertical specialized application. I guess we are going to see this split happen again soon.

PS: I do think that the news of RSS death might be exaggerated. Maybe some users don’t have time to bath in river of news anymore because they are too busy juggling real time applications, but most of these funky quick apps are still based on solid RSS pipes.

Still digging

I don’t have the precise date, but almost exactly 20 years ago I founded my company.

I turned 38 last week, and you have to be 18 to incorporate a company in Italy. 20 years ago I was already doing some small graphic and advertising jobs, and I could not wait to be able to have my own business.

Back then the name of the company was StudioIdea, we changed the name to Evectors in 1999 or 2000. The company has gone trough many different phases, but it’s always in the same business: help companies to communicate using computers.

I’m still having a lot of fun!