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On the 27th of April 2010 Spotify announced “Spotify – the next generation“. They started rolling out Spotify version 0.4.3 which included the largest feature upgrade since the launch in 2008. In this blog post I look more into the social features that they launched. The features are according to the Spotify blog post: “..centered on a fully editable Spotify music profile, with the ability to publish playlists, top artists and top tracks for public view. Discovering these profiles is simple as we’ve connected with Facebook so that you can instantly add your friends’ profiles“. This is cool. I tried it out, but I was surprised about their implementation of the Facebook integration. in this blog post I´ll describe what I think is some weakness with this implementation, and would love to get some dialog/comments from you. Maybe it´s only me that thinks it´s a problem?   Connecting to...
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For the last couple of days I have been testing out the Amazon CloudFront service using my blog as a sandbox. My goal was pretty simple: To set up Amazon CloudFront on my blog, enabling static files like images and styles to be distributed for fast access. This post describes my experimentation with it. It is not just straight forward work, and there are different approaches you may choose among. So I thought I should write a short walk through of the steps that I have taken. If you wonder what Amazon CloudFront is, or looking for information on how it could be used in conjunction with WordPress this post can give you an overview and help you getting started. Let’s start with Amazon CloudFront and what this actually is. CloudFront is a Content Distribution Network (CDN). The service distributes your data out to multiple datacenter locations, ensuring faster...
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In the wake of the financial crisis, the debate around online newspapers and the traditional newspaper model for making money has increased. Today media companies have major financial problems. The newspapers are losing revenue in several areas; subscriptions are declining, classified advertising revenues are sharply reduced, and advertising revenues fall dramatically. The result is powerful cost savings in various editorial with huge layoffs. At the same time a lot of newspapers editions are shut down. Do you dare to cannibalize big revenues? One of three big revenues for the newspapers and the media companies was from classifieds. During the last 10 years classifieds has moved from print to online, but the newspapers underestimated the impact of the web and did not see the transformation. Robert Weisman has a great article titled ‘What went wrong?’ where he describes how (and why) The Boston Globe was a victim of its enormous...
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Twitter is one of the hottest tech-companies on the web right now. The 3 year old company is reaching mainstream and is growing with a breath taking speed. Twitter.com grew 131 percent between February and March to 9.3 million visitors (US). It seems that they will pass LinkedIn in a very short time – just having Facebook and Myspace ahead of them. Real-Time A lot of attention is given Twitter in Media and the blogosphere. Read Write Web wrote and article back in January titled Sorry Google You Missed The Real-Time Web. They focus on the fact that Twitter is taking a place in the breaking news area, and that Google always will be late due to the nature of the indexing. Jeffrey Mann discusses why Twitter should not work hard to find a business model One of his key points is that Twitter’s value is in its content....
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On the 17th of February 2009 FINN.no – one of the largest websites in Norway put out a signal to all it’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) users (I’ve just taken the translation from an article in The Register, it’s about 99% correct translated) : Heads up: You’re using an older version of Internet Explorer. In order to get the most out of our website, you can get a free update of Internet Explorer. If you’re using a work computer, you should contact your IT administrator. Actually The register seems to have copied this translation from a blog post by Christian Johansen At the same time as we put out this message, we released a post on FINN labs (our public feedback and experimental area) which described in detail why we are showing this information to our IE6 users and also gave a list of alternative browsers. The code to...
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In the past years, Google has increased the focus on directory listings (yellow pages). OneBox is a product that combines links to paid content and ads with the usual information in the search results. The search is developed around the needs of the user, and are about to erase the distinction between promotional advertising and catalog. This challenges the established business models, and adding pressure on the industry. Personalized view of relevant content Google OneBox (pictured) provides a personalized view of relevant content of various types that match your query. The product is developed for several categories, including maps, travel and directory (Local businesses). In recent years, Google has entered into agreements with local directory publishers or players for access to quality content. This is packaged with content that is retrieved (or crawled) from many different sources on the web, in order to provide a richer search results for...
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I have been using Amazon S3 with Jungle Disk as a Client for the last couple of years. This is a great solution though the cost is pretty high if you compare it to just buying an external disk. What is Amazon S3, and Jungle Disk Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. I use it to backup all my digital contents (music, photo, video). Amazon S3 does not offer any type of clients to typically access the service just a set of API’s. I first started out with implementing my own client but found out that writing my own client is just too geeky. I use Jungle Disk as a client to access my S3 account. This combination works perfect and I’m really happy with both S3...
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This year there have been some developments related to the challenges we have with many different and closed social networks. Facebook, MySpace, Reunion, LinkedIn, Xing and many many more gives me a headache. There are several problems and challenges related to your identity online and technologies that make up the ‘Open Stack’ like OpenSocial, PortableContacts, OAuth, XRDS-Simple and OpenID is designed to resolve this. I think that ‘Open’ has had quit a lot of attention this year. Log in with your preferred identity on the web If you are active and comment much on articles, blogs etc, the problem is to appear with one single identity. Lately both Facebook and Google has launched technologies (among others like MySpace)  that enables us to take our identity with us around the web for all sites implementing this functionality. This is a great step forward for social data portability.  My blog now...
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A few minutes ago FINN and Sesam launched what could be the biggest revolution in map handling for a decade, at least from an end-user point of view! The worlds biggest and most realistic 3D model is launched. Take a look at it here. The 3D model includes Oslo (the capital of Norway). The maps are generated by Swedish military technology (spin off from JAS-Gripen). The 3D maps give a birds eye perspective with a great end-user control. It’s like sitting in a small plane flying over the great city of Oslo. The 3D-player (it’s a plugin) is developed by the Norwegian company myVR Software. An early version of this technology has been tested out at http://www.hitta.se but the quality and further development since then gives us a product and service in a completely different league. Google Street View got a lot of attention when launched, but I think...
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