Paolo Weblog

Introducing Zzub.it

2009-05-14T13:00:29Z

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

2009-05-06T10:34:59Z

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

2009-05-04T19:44:59Z

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

2009-04-26T13:40:40Z

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

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").

Entity Relationship and PagesPlus

2009-04-23T16:02:41Z

Yes, I do understand that yesterday post was a little cryptic. ;-)

At evectors we are working on a new component of the PagesPlus architecture designed to manage entities and relationship.

It all started by observing the flexibility of PagesPlus, which allows us to manage flows of content using different layers of tagging and plain queries to our aggregator and render the results on pages or widgets trough a templating mechanism.

Since most of the sites we design these days are built not only around content but also other types of elements (users, groups, products, companies, etc.), we started trying to figure out a model as simple as the aggregator to manage other types of data.

So, we invented the Entity-Relationship model (only to discover that somebody had already invented it much earlier) and we started building an engine which could manage in the most neutral way entities, relationship between entities and tags and make them available to our WYSIWYG page layout tools.

With this component (which we call Erm) we can define an entity and tag it as "user" and then define a relationship and tag it as "friend of". But we can also create entities tagged "brand", "company", "product", "group", ect. or relationships tagged "fan of", employee of", "owner of", "belongs to", etc, allowing us to define a lot of different sentences. Different types of entity can be linked to additional attributes, hosted either in our own databases or on some external service reachable trough an API, making the whole environment very scalable.

While developing these new components, we are also building a couple of real sites for real clients using this new approach (this is helping us keeping everything real and provides some very serious deadlines).

Yesterday's video was displaying the tool which allows to create a query to the Entity Relationship Management engine (i.e.: find 10 entities of type user which have a relationship with this brand, sort them alphabetically and display their names and avatars) and render the result on a page.

Entity Relationship Management

2009-04-22T17:13:14Z

We have just turned on a new feature on PagesPlus, which I think will make a big difference in our future. The new entity-relationship engine offers huge flexibility for social media projects.

Further details will follow shortly, meanwhile thanks to the whole team at evectors!

Peony

2009-04-18T13:19:21Z

This year they are blooming one week earlier than last year.

Multi-language Social Networks

2009-04-15T14:20:54Z

From the logo I see today on FriendFeed, I guess they just introduced localized versions of their UI. For the Italian and the Turkish markets.

I don't care much, usually I don't like localized versions, but the move totally makes sense: FF is quite popular in Italy, and from what I hear social networks are very popular in Turkey.

But while most social networking tool support multi-language UIs, what they are missing is support for multi-language users.

It's what happens to everybody who speaks English and a other languages, and has friends speaking exclusively only one of those languages.

I ended up trying to write most of my stuff in English, because my friends on-line are a pretty mixed group. But I do realize that sometime I publish stuff in Italian, and while most people can live with it, I know that somebody is slightly annoyed by this.

I don't think that figuring out a language of an item is very difficult these days, but I'm still waiting to see a social network that does this well, allowing users to receive only items in languages they can understand, if they want to.

As far as I am concerned: I'm happy to see some French, or German or any other language, crossing my feeds from time to time.

Time to change ISP

2009-04-14T09:13:43Z

Last Thursday one of our servers, hosted with an ISP in the Bay Area, suddenly disappeared from the Internet.

Turns out we were among the many victims of the cable cuts down in San Jose, as we found out hours later.

I'm not happy with how our ISP handled this incident. It's not just for the outage, I've been in this business long enough to know that shit simply happens and sometimes there's not much you can do about it.

I could also probably live with the fact that nobody on my team was able to reach tech support on the phone for hours.

I could live with the fact that they were so badly effected, that even their websites and email services were down.

I could live with the fact that they didn't put an alert in their voicemail message, the only form of contact from the company, describing what was happening.

I could live with the total lack of feedback on their twitter account.

I could also live with the fact that we only got a message from them after the network was back on line, nine hours later.

What I cannot live with is the fact that the in the post mortem message I received after the incident, the company CEO was blaming "vandals/terrorists" for what happened.

Using the "t word" as an excuse is simply ridiculous. Time to find a new ISP.

BlogLiguria - Il Secolo XIX

2009-04-01T23:03:58Z

Last week we opened a new site based on PagesPlus: BlogLiguria.

The site is run by the staff of Il Secolo XIX, one of the most important Italian local newspapers very pupular in Genoa and the Liguria region. They are using our aggregator with a slightly different twist, letting anybody subscribe to the service and republishing automatically all subscribers' posts, mixing them with content generated by the editorial staff and content gathered from public sources.

A new PagesPlus feature which was introduced with this project is geotagging support: the aggregator is now able to decode the most used standards for geographical data tagging of contents, consequently next to the traditional "river of news" and "tag cloud" navigation, you can also browse the aggregator using a map.

Early adopters

2009-03-24T14:35:48Z

Today I installed again PhotoShop on my MacBook Air (painfully going trough a reactivation process on the phone since I had forgotten deactivating it on the old MacBook).

Back in 1989, my father started importing in Italy a little boxy scanner for 35mm slides called Barney Scan. It was the first scanner to use fiber optics to backlight slides.

But by far the most interesting feature of this scanner was the software that came with it. It allowed to do some very cool effects using multiple channels, something I had never seen before and immediately fall in love with.

That summer I was working with movie director Dante Majorana on the special effects of a movie titled "Orlando Sei", and I remember flying back and forth to Rome taking with me the NuBus card of that scanner, without which the software would not work.

The same software was later licensed to Adobe, they renamed it PhotoShop and the rest is history.

Apparently only 200 Barney Scan scanners were sold.

Which means that I'm one of the first 200 PhotoShop users. 20 years ago.

It's spring

2009-03-21T08:19:23Z

Our plum tree is the most optimistic tree of the garden: as soon as it starts getting a bit warmer, it explodes in a storm of blossom. Every morning we get this stunning view from our windows.

Then one day the Bora start blowing and all flowers fly away. It's spring.

Next Saturday I'll wake up in San Francisco.

Poets in the clouds

2009-03-20T13:24:03Z

This morning I followed this fantastic document by Dave, and in less than 30 minutes I had my virtual server up and running in Amazon's cloud.

Of course I knew it could be done, but I had never really found the time (and the courage) to try doing it until I got to this page which provides all answers in a simple step by step guide.

I think that the fact that a regular user can start his own server in the cloud has some of very relevant consequences.

I was exposed to the concept of "desktop web server" by Dave back in the Frontier and then Radio days. I have always thought that being able to run your own server on your own computer is a very powerful concept.

Since back then "our own computer" was the personal computer we were working on, it made sense to run server software on it. Unfortunately a personal computer quite often is not the ideal environment to run server stuff which needs maintenance, support, backup, and all the stuff that system administrators do.

But now, everybody can own any number of virtual computers in the cloud and run all kind of services. Easy, cheap, powerful, safe and somebody else is making sure that all system work. Brilliant.

The other very interesting concept of this experiment is that I didn't start just a random Windows server on EC2. I started Dave's server, with the software and services that Dave had installed on them, and this, of course, can make software distribution and entirely different business.

Not enough air

2009-03-16T14:51:34Z

For the last year I have been quite comfortable with my MacBook Pro + MacBook Air set-up. I would basically take the thin Air on the road and move the heavier Pro only when it was really needed. I tried to do my best to keep the Air "light" in every sense: running everything in a browser (no Office, no PhotoShop, no additional apps) and bought a very little bag for it (no big backpack and no external drives, adapters, headphones and other stuff). It has been a huge relief for my back and it works pretty well while on the road.

A couple of weeks ago, at the office we needed an additional MacBook Pro quickly, and I decided to give up mine: after all I thought I could live just with the Air.

I was wrong.

The MacBook Air is the perfect second computer: it's light, thin, beautiful, but it hasn't enough power to run modern (albeit bloated) applications. Even watching a video with a flash-based player, with only one browser open, after a while becomes too much for the little machine. 2Gb of Ram should be plenty, but today it means running Skype, a browser... and maybe another app before running out of memory, and since the HD is quite small and slow, on this machine you really want to avoid swapping at all costs. And I haven't even tried to install PhotoShop.

Well... I guess it's time to start thinking about my next "unibody" MacBook Pro :-)

New technology for Nòva100

2009-03-12T18:28:17Z

We just went live with a new version of the Nòva100 site.

While, of course, I'm enthusiast about all our projects and deeply in love all our clients, Nòva100 is a little special because it has been the first site where we tested our idea of using an RSS aggregator as the core of a content presentation system.

The idea behind Nòva100 is simple: find 100 interesting people, and leave them completely free to write what they want on their blogs. Then automagically generate a site to aggregate and present their work, offering some new ways to discover interesting stuff.

What is new with this new version of the site is that it is based on the latest version of PagesPlus, which will provide a lot of added flexibility to the editors of the site.

I recorded a quick demo to show how editors can add manage content on any page of the site.

I'm quite happy with the quality of the technology that we have been developing lately, but most of all I'm incredibly proud of the amazing team of people I work with every day at Evectors.