antti.vilpponen.net

The news is out, CBS acquires last.fm for 280 million USD - the largest Web2.0 acquisition in the UK. (via)

Seems like HS.fi just got a facelift. I actually like it quite a bit. Nothing too fancy, but just a small fine tune. Nice.

I let my Flickr pro account expire on purpose to see how the change would affect me. After the expiration I realised just how much I am into the service - although I don’t use it that much to be honest. Flickr has put its cashpoint (a term I coined for this) into an excellent spot to start cashing in on the user experience.

You can upload 100 MB a month, have the last 200 photos visible and a total of 3 sets to categorise your photos. This is just enough to get hooked onto the service, but not quite enough to feel satisfied what you get to do with the service. I have over a 1000 photos in Flickr (as far as I can remember, since I now only see 200 of them) and when you have that many photos you need good ways to sort them out - hence the sets. Three sets gets you nowehere - you need more, yet another reason to pay the $24,95 a year for the premium account.

Furthermore, Flickr has an excellent API that third party developers have taken full use of. There are hundreds of different applications that you can use to play around with your photos. For example, I have an Wordpress plugin that pulls my photos from the Flickr account to this blog. The plugin of course sorts out the photos and keeps them in a nifty order, just the way I want them.

I think I’ll have to dig in to my wallet and pay for another 2-year period of Flickr membership - it’s definitely worth it.

The lesson here?
Open up your services a bit, encourage developers to build applications into your platform and community and ultimately: give the users just enough so they get hooked (but there’s a lot more they get when they pay for the service). Another great example of opening up your service comes from Facebook - the all new F8, the Facebook platform. When Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old CEO of the company announced the platform - there was a lot of buzz created instantly.

No wonder, there are now 10 pages of applications available for the Facebook community. Also, small startups get extremely attractive market visibility for free. Facebook on the otherhand gets content and tools for their users to create more stickiness. Pretty much a win-win situation. iLike, a music network announced they instantly added 400 000 members to their databases, not bad a for a small startup. For the urgency of the matters, this letter gives some insight to the explosive growth.

Interesting times ahead for Facebook. Something that many web communities should take a note of, definitely.

Just noticed this on Jaiku - not sure I’d do the same though :)

Rite Venture has acquired 30% of Finnish webhosting company Nebula (via). Funny thing, not sure if the Rite Ventures acquisition had anything to do with it but we had our pipes broken this morning (Nebula is our ISP as well).

It’s nice to see some Finnish companies seeking growth and not only in Finland - something, to be honest, I’d love to see more. We’re still too self centric up here, imho.

Well done though!

Jaiku in the VC spotlight? Spotted this on Jaiku - seems like Jyri has done some nice networking! (Index Ventures has a very nice portfolio of web applications)

Yesterday I installed Richard Todd’s Jaiku midlet, which will allow me to Jaiku from my Communicator. The software itself is very plain, but it does the job. It’s easy and fast to use as well as soon as you get into it a bit.

The process was very straight forward and easy. I’ll go through it here step by step:

1. Go here and download the Tar package (at the time of writing the version was 0.4.4.)
2. Unpack the package to a folder on your computer
3. Fire up PC Suite on your computer and set up the connection to your phone.
4. Use Windows Explorer to transfer all the unpacked files (including the directories) to your Nokia 9300. (I moved them to my phone memory - should work fine with both.)
5. Once you’ve completed the transfer, fire up File Manager on your Nokia (by default found under “Office”).
6. Open the directory where you moved the unpacked files and fire up JaikuMIDlet.jar (second last file in the directory)
7. Go through the installation process and make sure to allow the icon to be set up on your Desk or some other directories.
8. Open Jaiku Posting Midlet on your phone and click on the “Menu”-button to access the menus. Set up your settings according to the Jaiku preferences and off you go!

Any comments?

…well sort of. Joi has received his Visa with the World of Warcraft graphics. Philip Torrene of Make blogged about this a year ago.

It’s a smart move from Visa as these guys are subscribers and pay monthly to World of Warcraft. Furthemore, it’s not just a small geeky bunch of players - they’re 8,5 million people who subscribe on a monthly basis to WOW membership. Nice, very nice.

You think the world’s moving faster around you than before? That’s because it is! BoingBoing reports on an ITV article that people walk 10% faster today than before. Link.

Joshua Porter from UIE Brain Sparks has a good blog post why investing effort into social features on websites pays off. This is pretty obvious in many cases but good to see it in writing as well.