The theme for the conference is „data love“. How all the data available for analysis and remixing shapes the way we live, which services we will enjoy in the future, etc. In the case of Tim Ferris: apparently he will talk about how he used all the data he measured from his body to test the various ways to get fit.
Here is a video of Matthias Schrader and Martin Recke about the event:
It’s a great advantage to have a cousin and best friend who travels a lot. I have spent quite a few vacations just visiting my cousin Gerhard in whatever location he lived at that time.
It’s also always interesting to listen to the stories of my cousin. Travelling most of Latin America, he has experienced many interesting and quite a few peculiar things and knows a lot about what to do, where to go, what to try, etc.
It gets even better now, that my cousin decided to share his travel stories, adventures and travel tips with a wider audience, i.e. everybody. Here is his way of sharing: He just recently created the blog „Vagabond Life„:
These tips will soon cover many countries in Latin America, since my Cousin usually travels to at least 3-4 different countries a year, with Costa Rica, Guatemala, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico being amongst the most often visited.
If my cousin keeps up pumping out about 2 posts a week, as he plans to, this could soon turn into one of the most valuable ressources for travel information on latin america on the web!
Mashable features the top 10 apps to watch for 2011. While some don’t seem to be too interesting for me and some to be just „me too“ apps that need to proove that they offer never seen additional value, one looked rather interesting to me: GetGlue
It let’s you checkin into Movies, Books, Shows, etc.
Somehow people got used to „checking in“ to things. And they also got used to sharing experiences. Weird concept though, that you check into a book. But the social aspect is great, because (as with foursquare) you can leave tips, comments, see who also checked in to that particular medium, etc. Does this need to be a „mobile“ app? Think not, as there does not seem to be any location aspect to it.
It also seems to be a cool recommendation engine. I wonder what else people will get the chance to check into? Meals, drinks? And who has the time to constantly update their checkin status for every single detail of life? I already keep forgetting to check in with foursquare all the time.
It’s time to take a look at the best memes of 2010. Rocketboom shows 6 Minutes worth of Memes and on MySpace someone published the following infographic:
Check out more awesome videos on Myspace
I definitely missed some of these, but I guess they are very much focused on memes from the US. I would not want to leave out the #blumenkübel meme we had running on twitter here in Germany, which made it to the international trending topics. It was so popular, that people from the US asked on twitter, what the hell #blumenkübel means…
There is an interesting series of three parts over at Techcrunch about Social Networks – past, present and future.
The article about the past of social networks mainly summarises how „social networking“ has always been present starting with chat sites like „the well“ and later compuserve, etc.
The article about the present gives an overview of the last 8 to 10 years, from Plaxo and Friendster to Facebook. Here are some snippets:
Enter Facebook. It had grown stratospherically from 2004-2007 to 100 million users, which actually was slightly smaller in December 2007 then MySpace was. Facebook was everything that MySpace wasn’t. It was: up-market, exclusive, urban, elite, aesthetically pleasing, ad-free and users were verified. MySpace was: scantily dressed, teenaged, middle-America, design chaos and on ad steroids.
What was the major difference between MySpace and Facebook?
But the critical distinction in the direction of both companies was that while MySpace was putting up moats to keep outside companies from innovating and making money off their backs, Facebook took the opposite approach. It launched open API’s and created a platform whereby third-party developers could come build any app they wanted and Facebook didn’t even want (yet) to take any money from them to do so.
He also writes about Twitter:
But what is magic about Twitter is that it is real time. In most instances news is now breaking on Twitter and then being picked up by news organizations.
At the end of this part, he mentions mobile social networking becoming the next big thing.
I know that in 2010 it seems ridiculous to say anything other than “Facebook has won—the war is over” and I know that it feels that way right now. Facebook is so dominant it is astounding. In a complete return to where we all began with AOL—the world is “closed” again as Facebook has become this generation’s walled garden. When you’re on Facebook you’re not on the Internet
Here are the 8 trends as an overview:
1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable
2. We Will Form Around “True” Social Networks
3. Privacy Issues Will Continue to Cause Problems
4. Social Networking Will Become Pervasive
5. Third-Party Tools Will Embed Social Features in Websites
6. Social Networking (like the web) Will Split Into Layers
7. Social Chaos Will Create New Business Opportunities
8. Facebook Will Not be the Only Dominant Player
Wo ich sonst so bin...