agoora ... smalltalk << Internet

Well, i'm pretty busy for the moment. Currently working on the next release of playscope.com video games websites (and currently migrating the CMS from my old version).

Also starting up thinking about new commercial website (3/4 months of development). Then, actually working on GWT and thinking about a technological move for my private developments (php -&gt; java or ruby), i still dunno what to use for the moment (lack of time suxx) ...

And at last one good news, i recently joined the openId community (and they seem to be very cool ppl (hi bill ! ). I'll implement the openId and openSocial principles in my next commercial website.

This are my predictions for 2008 (btw nothing really special) :

1. The Iphone will blast all the existing phone companies and GPS systems too and it will redefine the use of the day to day internet.

2. googlers will loose a lot of key members (departures)

3. Dedicated social networks will grow up (for healthcare, for patients, for cars lovers, movies and tv shows lovers, ...)

4. Semantic search technology (powerset.com) will be beaten by human social search engines (mahalo.com) for the same reasons as today, mahalo answers with better results than a standard search engine (google, live, yahoo, ask)

5. 3d shopping websites will rise up (potoroze.com (hi sebastien )

6. Year for personal videoblogging and quality video contents (hulu, new players and professional-driven models)

7. Turnover will start again in many companies due to the "Internet rebirth"

8. RIA and accessibility will be good friends

9. Our personalized giftcards websites like loveticket.com will grow up

10. Facebook will lead the advertizing industry and become the #1 website worldwide

I have been working on content management for more than a decade, and i wrote my first content management system in 2002 (used by my current employer and also by some websites (playscope.com, aysun.org, loveticket.com, parismontmartre.org, ...). Features like tags, classification, related documents, search engine, themes, rich editor, taxonomy, collaborative filtering, peronalization, users management, communities, rich media, marketing rules, content ordering are currently available on it.

But the question i'm asking myself now is : is it worth doing to redesign a content management system nowadays ? I like to code, but i have to rebuild all from scratch now, and to introduce web services on it, i have all the ideas on how and what to do, but it's quite difficult to build this alone and after work. Well, I should do it and firstly work on the webservices (and new technologies of course : openId, rpc, wcag-aa, gwt .. ), i hope 2008 will be my rebirth on the Internet (more post to come with samples screens from my cms soon).

Every decade, the technologies have a revolution, in my short life, i had the chance to grow up when the current revolution was the deployment of the internet in France in 1995/1996. It was so exciting and i have learned and created so much things and met many cool, sawwy and interesting people. That was so great ! : bringing internet in everybody's life, that was an incredible experience and the best thing to work on.

Then 2001 comes, and everything goes down... At this time, some of my friends were fired, they started to travel around the globe and some others started to work on the cellphones technologies, but honestly it was really not exciting (doing ringtones and wap/imode services was not a difficult work), and the voice/video/internet convergence was really not a subject, so i decided to move in another way and to work for a large company on web content management and personalization but i was in my bubble and really far from my passion : the Internet.

Last month, Apple Iphone has been released in France, and i have never wanted a thing like this since 12 years (Working on the internet and help bringing the technology in everybody's house). The iphone will change our lives and change the way everybody's using the internet. There are many new usages possible now with this tool, and it'll be so cool to follow and to take part of this. Now, i can use internet everywhere, without any rule, without any firewall, without any limits. Apple did it : the technologies convergence with the iphone is real. Next year, everybody will use the internet everywhere, without any limit. This will change all the industry. This is why the iPhone is to be a major breakthru in the internet industry.

The revolution has just begun. This decade will be really interesting, a techology big bang is coming.

Apple website

Yesterday, i was at Leweb3 conference in Paris, and one of the best moment i had was Mr Jason Calacanis / Mahalo presentation. I loved the way he defend the Internet with so much Passion and he's absolutely right, internet is being polluted and this is killing the community. Two years ago, i was about to create a search engine on that subject, something between del.icio.us / experts exchange - social network and google, but i had no time to move forward alone.

My initial concept was : nowadays, it's becoming difficult to find relevant contents on the internet, because many players started doing SEO on search engines, and companies started to monetize keywords on search results. That's, on my purpose, part of the internet pollution. I really thought that the solution was to build a different search engine based on both human and computers ranking algorithms. The aim of this project was to provide relevant contents first (i started to think about a mix between computer rankings and human votes while using linkedin answers, every question i have asked was answered very quickly and with a relevant answer all the time).

I thought the ratio between computers rankings algorithms and human rankings would be 40% / 60%, with some special features :

- Each rating made on the websites has to be reviewed by peers

- Each website in the index has to be found in the 2 first results pages of each major search engine (ask, google, yahoo, live)

- NO ADS, every user is able to make a donation each year to the community to stop that kind of lame business.

- The search engine is opened free, but if you wanna contribute, you had to be invited by a friend only. And your friend is responsible of your voice too (if you're doing bad things, he'll also pay (user level downgrading and rating downgrading))

Then, i stopped my project when somebody told me that Jason has done Mahalo and he answered many of my ideas with his ecosystem. Mahalo is great, go and test it as you like (http://www.mahalo.com/) this is part of the future of the free internet.

More than words now, just watch Jason conference there :

Jason Calacanis 2007 LeWeb3 Presentation - Part 1

Jason Calacanis 2007 LeWeb3 Presentation - Part 2

Jason Calacanis 2007 LeWeb3 Presentation - Q&A

Thank you Mister Calacanis.