antti.vilpponen.net

Historic Tweets at Historicaltweets.com

Antti — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:05:14 +0000

How Do You Read Your E-mail?

Antti — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:44:18 +0000

I’ve been using different installable e-mail applications for a long time and been relatively happy with them. However, recently I’ve begun thinking that maybe I should begin to leave my e-mail in the “cloud” to make it always accessible (through mobile phones for example). In this context, I’m mainly talking about GMail. There are of course advantages and disadvantages to using either of the options, but GMail has recently gotten relatively (if not very) good at handling e-mail as a web app and this has made me ponder whether I should drop the installable applications and simply use e-mail through the browser.

I want to ask you a question - how do you read your e-mail and why?

Al-Jazeera’s Twitter Account For The Gaza Conflict

Antti — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 09:50:18 +0000

Al Jazeera, the Arabic media network, has created a Twitter account for the Gaza conflict. You can find it at Twitter.com/AJGaza. The conflict itself is very difficult and not likely to be quickly resolved. Nevertheless - I’m looking forwards to hearing the Arabic side of the story as well.

New Year’s Resolutions for 2009

Antti — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:54:40 +0000

Better late than never, right? I decided to think of some new year’s resolutions and try to follow these through out 2009. Here they are in no particular order:

Sleep more/better
Go spinning several times a week
Drink less alcohol
Eat more healthy food
Make Gyllene Skor clients a ton of money
Take ArcticStartup overseas with its events
Get back to swimming
Drink less coffee and more tea
Put effort in building a proper relationship
Ride another Iron Butt ride in Finland
Try to do a road trip in Europe with the Triumph
Blog more
Video blog more
Walk to work more

That should be plenty to accomplish in this year. What are you looking forwards to getting done in 2009?

Image by Alberto+Cerriteño: Future (CC:BY-NC-SA)

Happy New Year 2009!

Antti — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:16:57 +0000

I’m writing this from on board the Intercity 71 train from Helsinki to Kajaani, I’m on my way to Rantasalmi for New Year’s eve. I’ll be spending the transition from 2008 to 2009 in good company, enjoying good food and a sauna - nothing fancy, but a nice way to relax.

I want to thank my readers for their time and also wish everyone a very happy and prosperous 2009. Hope your New Year’s Eve is a good and enjoyable one!

Tweetree = Bad Jaiku

Antti — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 11:15:20 +0000

Looking at twitter this morning I noticed people going crazy about this new service that combines Twitter and FriendFeed, called Tweetree. The service is pretty much summed up in the picture above. It’s trying to create a platform for discussions from the way twitter works. I had a conversation with warzabidul on twitter about Tweetree just being a bad Jaiku.

The thing that makes it bad is the sole reason why I believe that twitter is still no comparison for Jaiku, even though I prefer twitter these days for the community. The reason is of course the logic of a social object - there are no threads or logical ways in which to direct your tweet to a certain point. If you look at this from another point of view, it’s like trying to create hyperlinks that can only be applied to the domain and not the actual page where the information you are talking about resides on. You cannot create a healthy conversation around that.

I’ll write about this more today in my prognosis for the year 2009. I’ll also look back at the year 2008 in that post and to the two things I was pondering about that will become big in 2008 being video and lifestreams. There’s a lot around this issue, just look at Facebook what it did with its lifestream as you enter the service, it added comments to the individual updates as well as transformed the wall into your personal lifestream. This has also happened in other services such as LinkedIn. However, more on this later.

Nevertheless, I see US reinventing the wheel continuously with services such as Tweetree. They are incremental innovations and fail to disrupt the market in the way such as Jaiku did. However, acknowledging the community and network of the US West coast, they have a chance at becoming the game changer technology/service. It’s a harsh reality we, the rest of the world, have to live with until we create our own hubs that attract enough venture capital money and talent.

Update: Fred Wilson, from AVC, is commenting on the new UI of Twitter over here.

dave - you are right, tweetree is really excellent. i’ve seen the design work that twitter is doing for the next rev of its web app, and some of these ideas are in it but some are not.

as you know, i think its great that twitter supports third party clients, including web clients, and i’d actually be sort of bummed if they copied all of this because it would make a service like this redundant, and that wouldn’t be good.

thanks for pointing this out, it’s a real improvement and shows the way forward in a bunch of ways

What does this tell? Not much, but unfortunately I’m slightly worried about the development of twitter if they fail to see the importance of the social object in conversations.

Update 2: Michael Arrington picks this up at TechCrunch. I’m beginning to think he’s reading my blog as it’s exactly the same point I’m making here.

Happy Holidays from Strasbourg!

Antti — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:22:40 +0000

Christmas Eve Mass at the Cathedral Notre Dame of Strasbourg

Happy holidays from Strasbourg. I’m here on holidays and enjoying the Central European way of celebrating Christmas. It’s been very nice, despite the absence of snow. Last night we had dinner in a local restaurant offering a five course Alsace cuisine - needless to say it was delicious.

The restaurant was located just next to the Cathedral and the midnight mass was about to start. We decided to pop in for a visit to see how the Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus in Strasbourg. I’m part of the Finnish Lutheran church, but I do not practice religion at all. It was really interesting in a way that I realised that religions are run as extremely well defined and streamlined organisations and there’s a lot to learn for companies and startups.

I’m thinking of writing more about this in the following weeks, because I really believe there is a lot to learn here. In the mean time, I’ll drop the business logic in the background for a while and enjoy what the city of Strasbourg has to offer. Right after this, we’re off to Petite France to look for a restaurant that’s open on Christmas Day.

Enjoy your holidays, respect your peers and feel responsible for the less fortunate ones.

Twitter Elite of Helsinki, Finland

Antti — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:16:13 +0000

Via Twitter Grader / Elite of Helsinki.

Only Treasure To Carry

Antti — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 16:13:39 +0000

My good friend Mikko Järvenpää has released his first book Only Treasure To Carry. Mikko has written the book during his trip around the world. It contains 40 poems/short pieces of writing and 15 hand drawn maps of his surroundings during that trip. You can order it through Lulu.com and it costs only 12 USD.

Member of the Iron Butt Association

Antti — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:47:43 +0000

I just received an e-mail from the Iron Butt Association regarding my ride in August - I have been officially accepted as a member after successfully completing 1021 miles or 1643 km in 21 hours. It was my second attempt as the first try failed with the breaking of the chains in my Triumph TT. Nevertheless - I’m a proud member of the club that claims to have the world’s toughest motorcycle riders.