Diaspora, the self-claimed privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network. let’s examine each of those ambitious claims one by one.

Privacy aware. The question here is really: can a network be privacy aware? Is an infrastructure even able to make such promises? As long as this promise is just written, it makes only little sense to me, as privacy is most often not a question of the protocol or idea running a service, but rather of it’s implementation and mostly dependent on its users.

Personally controlled? Facebook is also controlled by it’s users. The problem is actually not control in the net itself, but control towards additional use of your data, e.g. for advertising or some other third party stuff. Again, a protocol or idea won’t be able to change that problem. Just by allowing a net to be just that, there is still a considerable chance of data being accumulated by one provider, like facebook, again. And, as long there is some data concerning you on a database server that is not exclusively administrated by you, your data is not personally controlled.

Do-it-all. I’d rather not comment on that one. But that’s what it is about here. Do-it-all. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s not. Doubtlessly, those smart guys are ambitious and gifted ( at least concerning PR ), but do-it-all is a bit.. over the top. Small steps. Just develop one application, show it, next one. It’s okay and cool and I really appreciate that the protocol can be used for anything, but that also implies complexity. And time.

Open-source. That’s just fine, but at the moment, it’s not. Neither the sources they’re working on, nor the protocol, which is, of course, the more interesting part, are available anywhere. Being a programmer myself, I really understand why the project source is not available at such an early development stage, but it’s crucial for this protocol to become published, even in an early version, as soon as possible.

The protocol, the heart of diaspora, is what invites other people to read and study it. Which may have some desirable consequences: I’d like to build a diaspora node, for example. And I’m pretty sure some other people like to as well. But even more interesting are the ones analyzing it from e.g. a security perspective, commenting on it’s scaling ability or just throwing in new ideas?

Diaspora is fine. I really respect the guys running this project, they are doing a great job, right idea, right time, nothing more powerful. But still, they should really take their time to consider changing some things. Let’s create a google group, let’s share some technical details with the ( really interested ) mass, let’s communicate.

There are some unknown variables to me so far. I don’t know how much of the money reaches the designated receiver after all, how privacy and security is ensured, how money can be transferred to flattr and so on, yet, this idea opens up new horizons for people who want to invest time in software they don’t mean to sell, but still be able to live a life worth living.

I mentioned the video, it’s a well-made one, see below

( note: I’m using the logo without permission, hope the pirate-bay guys won’t mind that. )

The overall public perception of Google in Germany is quite negative, but it wasn’t always. In the early years, Google was seen as a great company, very much like the “don’t be evil”-claim suggests. Over the years yet, this attitude has shifted towards an, in my opinion, overly critic one. The main concerns are privacy and the fear of an uncontrollably huge enterprise with almost unlimited power in the internet. While all of these fears are at least partially reasonable and justified, they are nothing more but a result of an organic development and the business model of Google. This development has only been possible by a number of components working together brilliantly: the idea, the team, the environment, and the time in which all of Google happened.

Contrary to other big players in the industry, no one was ever forced to use Google. Although this is a weak point, it’s still important in understanding why government programs to limit Google’s influence are set to fail. Google dominates the market not by a policy in which all other competitors are either bought or killed, it dominates the market by being the best. This is valid for GMail, the Google Search, Maps and many other applications. The consequence is simple: Users tend to use the best, that is, Google. A very high market share at the end is just a symptom for the lack of knowledge of other players involved, but no consequence of some evil tendency on Google’s side.

What about privacy? First of all, there is a discrepancy. While searching for people and last names is super-popular, this is only valid as long as the own name is not represented in any ( negative, compromising ) way. So basically, Google should fix the stuff people mess up on the internet, be it by uploading pictures or by writing private sex-blogs. Something Google will never do, because it’s simply not possible, and a search engine can’t be replacement for a responsible and conscious use of this medium.

The other privacy concern is the usage data Google gathers. This happens e.g. when you use GMail, the Google Search, Google Documents, and virtually all other products provided. This data is collected to improve the overall experience, e.g. by providing recommendations or remembering settings, by customizing results and so on. But this data is only collected once you start using Google. Google Analytics, using also cookies to track unique visitors, is by the way just a product provided by Google for Website owners. In case you feel offended by that, you should therefore contact the staff of any website in question, rather than Google.

What is clear to me after writing these few paragraphs: the Problem is not Google, the problem is the non-existence of any kind of competitor on this continent. Having been unable to create a sustainable Internet business in the last ten years ( help me if I’m wrong ) on the continent, instead of improving the conditions for IT-Startups, the education, this problem shall now be solved by reanimating the poor idea of protectionism.

The question should be, why we are simply unable to be a successful country when it comes to non-copied, innovative startups and great companies. And how to solve that.. I don’t know.

After having mastered the fun part of the day, I had a really interesting skype call with a former colleague of mine who is now enrolled at UCL. We spoke about some projects we have been doing, and of course the upcoming ones. And I guess a sideproject of his, 1bucketapp.appspot.com, is really worth mentioning. I don’t know what to do with it, but maybe you can put it to use.

Another, at first sight, useless site is http://750words.com/, a project where everyone is encouraged to write 750 words every day. The texts are not published nor accessible to anyone else but you, so it’s a private diary for everyone who has a need for one. From my personal attempt to use it I can tell that 750 words is a lot.

The last interesting snippet of the day was a collection of tipps for keeping Java code clean and maintainable. Although the text dates back to 2001, it’s still of remarkabel relevance and definitely worth reading.

First of all, I noticed something Techcrunch was also writing about some time ago, that google doesn’t protect embedded images in private documents in _any_ way. So basically, everything you upload there can be treated as public.

Next thing, latex, the typesetting system, seems to be stuck in a time where character encodings where something rather bizarre, and for that reason has it’s share of problems with it. There are packages, like utf8 and utf8x to work around this issue, but it’s not perfect. What I’ve experienced, a strange error message telling me that

Package inputenc Error: Unicode char u8:  not set up for use with LaTeX.

And my way to get around it was to simply add the packages ucs besides utf8 to the preamble..

usepackage{ucs}
usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

and everything is working fine now. great.

Last topic today is a project update. What’s going on?

• A virtual keyboard for android with some nice effects, I’m doing this one together with Marc Seeger.
• I just participated in the foundation of the Google Technology Usergroup Neckar-Alb ( A region in southern germany around Stuttgart ), and we hope to be able to provide the community here with some cool events in the future! If you want to participate or are just curious, be sure to check out our twitter.
• I’m currently also writing a paper on distributed contact management, a really interesting field, stay tuned on that one.
• Some hacking involved, but nothing releasable actually.

If you want some nice reading, I can really recommend two papers: the first one is on API design, and some kind of a .NET-rant, it’s called “API Design Matters” and is written by Michi Henning. The other one was written by Marc Seeger and is a practical overview of available Key-Value stores ( applause for NoSQL ). Get it on his blog.

The next weekend I’m going to spend in Hamburg, really looking forward!

The common cliche is that most things have been developed, so there is not much left to do but reinvent. That is wrong. When google hit the search engine market, everybody was convinced that they would fail, the market was already crowded by many providers, though no one offered a simple, speedy search without a bloat interface. Nowadays, google leads.

37Signals did the same thing, although way more small-scaled. By providing easy-to-use applications for small businesses, they just created what many people need, communication-enabled platforms.

I guess the real challenge is to create things that everybody will like, yet nobody developed already. And there are many things, like an eBay replacement ( ebay sucks ), contact management, password management.. I could easily extend this list, but it’s up to your imagination what to do with all this stuff.

Certainly, we don’t need any more CMS or blog-engines, no guestbooks, no bulletin-boards, not even new wiki engines. They are there and working, so start doing something new. Please.

First of all, everyone doing something seriously should be able to get a certificate on his or her field of work. If you’re a professional, why bother taking a test and tell the world you made it? I’m getting your point here: a test only for the sake of a test isn’t worth it, right.

Web standards are a very serious matter. Of course, the average internet user doesn’t bother if a page doesn’t look cool or something, even flash-based pages impress. But when it comes to accessability, typography, usability, web standards try to give developers a good set of tools one can use to improve the overall experience of both the developer and the consumer. There is no direct impact of whether you’re still using tables or already using divs to layout your content, but in the long run it will pay out, even if it’s only that you made it to decrease your traffic costs.

Another very important reason is that web-development and web-design is still terribly underpaid. Many of my friends are doing such things for .. almost nothing, while some well-established companies are building terrible html4 pages and getting a huge load of money for it. And that’s where a certification would kick in. And by proving customers that you are indeed worth it, everyone with the real ability to build web-based stuff would certainly have the realistic chance to increase his or her income.

In my opinion, this certification should be something free, a community should build it, I don’t know how but I’d be glad to have such a thing.

Back to Piwik: the two main advantages over Googles solution are that you keep the data local and can do whatever you want with it, and for the curious, statistics are realtime.

The installation went down without any problems, as expected. Unfortunately, another PHP software requiring MySQL, though Piwik uses DataObjects, so porting it to work with any other DBMS shouldn’t be a big deal.

The snippet to include is a bit larger than Google’s one, Piwiks one is this:

While Googles snippet looks something like this:

Note that Google updated their snippet recently to include now a try-catch blog. Read the Analytics page for more info here. If you want to try out Piwik, just drop me a line and I’ll give you an account here if you want.

I’m quite curious on how the stats look like, I feel better to host them here than anywhere else, and I’ll also post some comparison of the actual stat results. Stay tuned!

I’m convinced that there are enough people to start up a project dedicated to building a graphics suite, open, based on already existing tools. Have you heard of Scribus, a great publishing tool for Linux, free? Amazin software, and I dare to speculate that GIMPs codebase isn’t bad, it’s just some frontend stuff that is. By creating a cool team and spending some time on unifying the user interfaces among these, a great step towards permanent switching would be made.

Still, what are you’re experiences with GIMP or do you know any other, comparable tools?

Could a similar system be also built for free blog-to-blog linking? I guess there are many blogs out there dealing with almost the same topics from time to time, and I think it’s a pity that there is no automated way ( i know of ) to link these blogs based on the post contents. While a hard restraint for such a service to work would be that it is free and easy to customise, many bloggers focusing on their readers would embrace such a system. Once again, free and without any commercial background.

Edit: I guess someone’s done some cool work here, the plugin is called Ping Crawl and links to related posts and also pings them. Nice! Edit, 2: Ping Crawl to be quite uncontrollable and since it actually just looks at your tags, it’s not working well. Though text analysis is certainly hard to do, it’s the only way, I’m afraid.

This is another one of my ideas, and I’d be really glad if I could only realise one of them. If you want to help me out, please please please contact me.