Busy days

A lot of things going on these days.

We are about to submit the first version of smartfi·sh (site under construction… we have been busy) to the Apple Mac App Store. If everything goes well it should be available for download shortly. Needless to say, this is all quite exciting.

I’m also working on another launch: next Tuesday at LeWeb London we will present CQSpark: come and find us in the Demozone 2, Pod10, if you are in London.

Last but not least, Friday and Saturday of next week we will run State of the Net, our own conference in Trieste. We already have more than 360 registered attendees, an awesome group of speakers and a pretty exciting program.

Meanwhile, my awesome partners at Evectors are working on some pretty exciting new Pages projects.

Going to the rivers

1. Read Dave Winer on Rivers of News

2. Read Doc Searls on Rivers of News

I don’t know how many times I have had this discussion on rivers of news with clients in the publishing business. I don’t think that I have ever been able to convince them, especially journalists, to go with a river approach of just displaying posts with a simple reverse chronologically order.

Because they want control. They want to decide what goes at the top of the page. They truly and deeply believe that the home page of a site is sacred ground where they can unleash all their editorial power.

The fun fact is that more and more they are seeing these precious home pages (at least from the advertising point of view) being skipped altogether by users who find deep links on social networks…

…all of which display posts in what is in all effects a “river” format. ;)

Google Drive: a dead-end.

I have installed Google Drive this morning, hoping that we could use it as an alternative to Dropbox for an upcoming product we’re working on.

The need is simple: let users publish an RSS feed.

From a first analysis (I hope I’m wrong), it looks like even if I make an item in my Google Drive public, it doesn’t have a permanent URL, which means that it’s impossible to subscribe to it.

Now: companies have not been understanding links for all the story of the Internet, but you would expect that Google of all big and stupid companies would be the one able understand the value of permanent URL and how this empowers others to build things, layer after layer. The fact that you can’t easily link to an object in your Google Drive so that another piece of software (and not a browser) could read it makes this service a dead-end.

Btw: this is exactly the contrary of being open.

Rant #2

I love Skype. It’s probably the application I use most, if it wasn’t for Skype my company could not exist in the form it has today, spread across 4 countries (we are a mini-multinational).

When conferencing with multiple parties, the first 5 minutes of every call can be used in one of these two ways:

1. everybody is commenting how wonderful modern technology is and how amazing it is that we can see and hear each other across the world;

2. one of more parties repeat a hundred times “can you hear me?” and “no, I cannot hear you!”

I hate calls of the second kind.

Another bloated apps rant

About 20 minutes ago I decided to do a little job which involved choosing a photo I took last week and use it to create a banner for a client’s site. The mission required to start Aperture, select a project, right click on a photo, open it with Photoshop.

20 minutes later, I’m still waiting to be able to edit the picture with PS. Both Aperture and Photoshop (CS6) are wedged. Mine might not be the freshest of MacBook Pros, but it still has a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Due processor and 8GB of Ram, most of which is available.

Can’t really say why this is taking so long, but with every new version these apps seem to be slower and to use resources less efficiently.

Okay… it looks like I can finally edit my photo. 23 minutes. Not even in 1988…

360 Panorama: highly recommended

I have really been enjoying 360 Panorama lately. If you don’t know already, it’s an iOS/Android application that lets you take panoramic images very easily. Yesterday for example, while cutting a corner trough Hampstead Heath, I took this:

It’s pretty cool to see it embedded, but it’s absolutely awesome if you open this link on your iPhone and you click on the “gyroscope” icon: http://360.io/B5T3K5.

At that point just hold your phone in front of you and turn around, and you will experience the panorama in a completely different way.

Now I could tell you the story of the early QuickTime VR shots, using cameras, tripods with custom-built mounts, actual film, Philips PhotoCD, and controlling the stitching application via command line in MPW. But I won’t.

State of the Net 2012

So it’s official: there will be another State of the Net Conference in June.

I’m very happy about this, the 2008 edition was a huge success, but the following years we had not been able to find the resources to run it again, then we all had our other priorities and crises, and we did not organise it anymore.

This year, mostly thanks to Beniamino’s endless energy, we’ll do it again.

I think that this is a good time for another Sotn, there are just too many things that need to be thought again, and even if we have just started putting the agenda together, we can already see that it will be a very interesting event. How could it be any different? We have great partners, sponsors, and the most beautiful location in the most beautiful city at the end of June.

How can you possibly not come? See you all in Trieste.

Graphic design and the web

There seem to be several conversations about graphic design and the web (and apps) these days. The argument is usually “good ol’ simple html” vs. “sleek yet bloated pages”.

I come from the design camp.

When I started working in the late ’80s it was the early days of desk top publishing. Apple had just introduced the Macintosh and most of all the first Laser Writer. Suddenly everybody with a Mac could use 14 font families. And many were using all 14 of them. On the same page.

But then real designers started using this amazing technology, and for a few years we all had fun.

Then the web came about, and we were forced give everything up.

The advantages of the web were so huge that we just had to live with very limited design capabilities. Only a handful of fonts. Layouts impossible to experience in the same way across different browsers and operating systems. Crazily nested tables to try to get a bit of information where we wanted on a page. It was ugly, but it was beautiful.

15 years later we are experiencing again the possibility of doing beautiful design, this time on the web.

I think that we are again in an “all fonts on the same page” period. It’s exhilarating, and it will take a little while before real design will start happening again.

And it will be beautiful.

Privacy

I’m not incredibly concerned about some apps sucking out my address book. After all I do have some degree of control on that.

Yet I am a bit annoyed about my own address being posted all over the place by thousands of people and their apps.

In other words: I can stop using Path today (I won’t), but my address will continue to be posted to hundreds of different sites every day without any control. The moment you give any piece of information to somebody with a smartphone, that piece of information is no longer private. End of story.

Video, now and then.

Warning: this is one of those “amazing what you can do with technology these days” kind of post.

When I was a teenager I used to hang around in a friend’s shop selling video equipment. This is where I used a video camera for the first time. It was something like this:

It was the most incredible piece of technology! It had a tiny black and white monitor, and you could see the world in this little TV, in real-time. It’s probably impossible to understand today how exciting it was back then.

After shooting there was editing. Not all consumer VCR could edit videos, most could not. At the shop we had one called “Hitachi VT-8” (why do I even remember this?), which was an extremely advanced tool which allowed to edit video material.

…25 years pass by…

I’m working from home these days, and a couple of hours ago I went downstairs for a coffee. While the coffee was brewing I watched out of the window, the Bora wind blowing in my garden, and with my phone, I shot and edited this.

 

A song

While watching a TV show the other night I heard a song and used Shazam to find out author and title (and see real-time lyrics, isn’t that feature cool?).

The next day I tried to buy the song on iTunes store, but it was only available as part of an album. Which I did not want to buy.

At this point I was quite ready to steal it, but then I found it on another site, Italian, and I got the mp3 there (it was cheaper too).

As soon as the mp3 was downloaded, iTunes imported it and it notified iCloud of my new purchase.

Seconds later the very same file that Apple didn’t want to sell to me had been automatically downloaded to my iPhone.

We live in interesting times.

Ubuntu HUD

This is an interesting idea.

I’ve been a big fan of Quicksilver for a long time, and recently I have found myself more and more going to the Search feature of the MacOS Help menu as a shortcut to other menu options. It perfectly makes sense to me. [via Brent Simmons]

[HUD] It’s a way for you to express your intent and have the application respond appropriately. We think of it as “beyond interface”, it’s the “intenterface”. This concept of “intent-driven interface” has been a primary theme of our work in the Unity shell, with dash search as a first class experience pioneered in Unity. Now we are bringing the same vision to the application, in a way which is completely compatible with existing applications and menus.

Facebook Ghetto

For the last couple of months I have kept Safari, which is my main browser, logged off Facebook. When I want to check what’s going on there (there’s many people I care for on Facebook, mostly family), I switch to Chrome. This is actually not very different from switching to the Facebook app when I’m on my iPhone or iPad. The reason I do this is to prevent Facebook from tracking my web surfing (would be nice if they would expose who they think I am as Google does).

In this set up what I find annoying are web applications that rely exclusively on Facebook for some features. For example, I would like to look into Wavii but they only support Facebook log-in (it’s a beta). Or in the case of Pinterest, the only way to find friends is, again, connecting my Facebook account.

To use these other apps I just switch to Chrome and do whatever I need with them, it’s not very different from switching from a browser window to another, I have plenty of RAM and I always run several browser anyway. But the curious result is that Chrome is becoming the ghetto of FB-only apps.

Wonder where this will end…

Borders

On September 15, 1947, Gorizia was incorporated into Italy again, and a new border was drawn (or literally painted) with Yugoslavia. I always find old footage fascinating (click the picture to go to the British Pathé site).

The border is still there but there are no checkpoints and anybody can freely cross it.

We are working on some projects which should contribute to make these borders even less relevant.

Scotch Eggs and serendipity

We heard about Scotch Eggs for the first time last week.

Then I happened to be in London for a day, so I bought some good sausages at Allens. Quite randomly, a friend had recorded a food show where famous chef Heston Blumenthal was presenting his own version of these eggs. At the end of the long boiling + frying + baking process, the yolk should still be runny.

On Saturday, we gave it a try, with quite good results.

Don’t be stupid

Euan Semple about the Olympic communication team social networks restrictions:

Trying to control use of the social web in this way in this day and age is impractical. It makes the organisers look stupid.

They are not alone. Most people running our institutions don’t understand what is happening and don’t know what to do about it. They pay agencies to do it for them and the agencies themselves don’t understand what is going on, or find it challenging and try to retain their own form of control.

I see this every day, and even if it isn’t rocket science, it’s so distant from current corporate culture that I’m afraid that until every single member of this generation will be out of the game, we won’t see real change.

Meanwhile we should get at work figuring out new kinds of organizations.

Social networks and me

I have been thinking about how I use/see different social networking tools these days.

I’m sharing here some observations.

Facebook

I have never been a huge fan of Facebook, but I do find it useful to keep up with a lot of relatives I would not hear from otherwise. I almost never post anything to Facebook (my tweets and Flickr photos are automatically pushed). From time to time I re-share something I like. I’m also managing a few pages, but that’s another story. I have 454 friends on Facebook, the vast majority is people I actually know somehow. I use a secondary browser or iPhone/iPad apps for Facebook, as I find slightly annoying being tracked around the web.

Google+

I liked Google+ a lot in the first weeks. That’s probably because there was very little people there, and conversations seemed to be meaningful. Then Robert Scoble published a circle which included my account, and suddenly I had more than 5000 followers. I like the concept of circles, and I liked the idea of keeping a circle of “Italians” to post stuff in Italian (it’s incredible how bad all social networks are when you speak more than one language and you have friends who only speak one of them), but with the large number of followers I gave up keeping my circles sorted. Today I have 6710 followers and 205 people in my circles: I add those I find interesting. I still check Google Plus a few times a day (using my regular browser… I just can’t live without letting Google know everything I do).

Twitter

I’m not very good with Twitter. I find it hard to post meaningful stuff in 140 characters. I follow 439 accounts (people, companies, queens, squirrels, etc). Have 1815 followers. Sometimes I retweet something, I use it to push links (this post is a good candidate), but I don’t check Twitter that often. I have a list named “friends” I try to follow a bit more, but they keep hiding the lists feature in every UI change and I guess I will give up on them soon.

LinkedIn

For a very long time I was super-serious about not accepting connections from people I didn’t actually know. Lately I have been a little less strict about the rule (I do accept connections from people I find interesting, even if I don’t know them). I still turn down Indian businessmen and Venezuelan PR agencies, and I’m always slightly amazed by the fact that people I know do connect with them. I don’t see what’s the point.  I have more than 500 connections on LinkedIn. From time to time it has been useful to find some information about people I knew, but it really never worked when trying to make contact with others.

Path

Like many others, recently I have been playing with Path. I like to think of it as the network of people I like. It’s too soon to say if it will last, but it’s promising and I like the design of the app. If you wake up and your dsl line is down, friends will think that you sleep for days.

Foursquare

After some pretty intense activity in the past, I’m not checking it anymore. Never accepted contacts from people I didn’t know relatively well (knowing where I am is kinda private).

Others

I also have Plancast, Friendfeed, Quora, Dopplr, Digg, Slideshare in my “social-networking-open-all-with-one-click” bookmark, but I can’t really say I find any use in my accounts on those networks.

 How about social networks and you?

Time to blog

I started blogging about 10 years ago. My first posts are still there. Blogging was in the air. We were writing our posts, aggregating our feeds and updating our blogrolls.

I was still working in a nice corner office, my company was well funded, and I “had no idea what kind of shit was about to go down”. Let’s just say that few months later somebody burst my bubble.

For the following three or four years blogging is what really kept me going. It gave me contacts, business, partners, ideas. For a while also some small visibility which at times has been useful (and at times annoying).

Then it faded out. It wasn’t for the emergence of other social networking tools, I didn’t really moved elsewhere, I just stopped sharing. Partially it was because the conversation on blogging tools was pretty much over. Partially because there was a lot of smarter people with more interesting stuff to say. And also because I reached a number of reader that scared me.

Anyway, “the times they are a-changin'” (big time!), I think I will have more to share this year: it’s time to start blogging again.

 

Thanks Steve

Steve Jobs has had a huge impact on the whole world by influencing the life on millions. These are some of the moments I remember.

My parents’ company was an early Apple dealer, the first Apple ][ entered our home in 1979. I immediately started playing with it. I remember playing Breakout with paddles.

One or two years later (I must have been 10), my dad taught me some Basic programming. I remember writing a simple program which played a 4 frames animation of a stick-man playing basketball.

In the early 1984 the first Macintosh arrived. We unboxed it in our living room. And there was MacPaint. Life has never been the same: I didn’t need to write code anymore!

Not much later, a Mac in my bedroom was connected to an early modem. An acoustic coupler. I called a friend on the other side of Gorizia and we chatted in a terminal window.

In 1989 I incorporated my company: a tiny advertising and design agency. All because I loved using those tools.

It was going to MacWorld in San Francisco with my dad, in the late ’80, that I first met Dave Winer and Marc Canter who would later have huge influence on my work.

In those same years I met my wife when I was hired to teach her how to use Quark Xpress.

It was a time when Apple was almost a faith. There were constant endless discussions with everybody about why the Mac was better.

And then for some time the Mac was not cool. Many moved to Windows. Quite stubbornly I didn’t. (Steve was not at Apple at the time).

Actually we also had a NeXT Color Station in our office. We mostly used it to render 3D animations with RenderMan, back when Pixar was in the software business.

In order to put the NeXT on the same network with our Mac Quadra, I had to first figure out TCP/IP networking.

Then Steve got back to Apple, and Thinking Different started to be cool again.

I picked up the guitar again after many years and started studying music thanks to Garage Band.

There has been a Mac next to me for most of my life.

Thanks Steve.

We are all superheroes

A couple of weeks ago my iPhone stopped vibrating, so yesterday I sent it in for replacement (no Apple Geniuses in this part of the world).

I could easily drop my SIM card in some other old phone lying around the house, but making and receiving calls is the feature I’m less interested into, so I thought I’ll just sit tight and wait for a new iPhone 3GS to arrive in a couple of days.

After about 24 hours I can tell you how that it feels just like Superman exposed to kryptonite: I have lost my super powers.

This is what having the whole web in your pocket is: superpower. Or super-senses if you like.

Anyway, the grater awareness offered by knowing all the time exactly where you are, what’s on the other side of that building, what your friends are doing on the other side of the planet, and having access to more or less any information you might ever dream of, could have been the perfect subject for comic books not that many years ago.

Since I have plenty of time on my hands, I’ll start thinking about my superhero costume.

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!

1982

Since my mom started getting old 35mm slides scanned, all kinds of curious reminescences are bubbling up.

At work, in 1982
This is me, back when my parents’ business was just a room in our house. You can spot an Apple II (or, better, Apple ][), the box of a Vic 20 and, in the background, an Olivetti M20. In the next picture you can see that I was using a Sinclair ZX81 (connected to its fantastic “spark printer”).