Paolo Weblog

A couple of weeks ago my iPhone stopped vibrating, so yesterday I sent it in for replacement (no Apple Geniuses in this part of the world).

I could easily drop my SIM card in some other old phone lying around the house, but making and receiving calls is the feature I'm less interested into, so I thought I'll just sit tight and wait for a new iPhone 3GS to arrive in a couple of days.

After about 24 hours I can tell you how that it feels just like Superman exposed to kryptonite: I have lost my super powers.

This is what having the whole web in your pocket is: superpower. Or super-senses if you like.

Anyway, the grater awareness offered by knowing all the time exactly where you are, what's on the other side of that building, what your friends are doing on the other side of the planet, and having access to more or less any information you might ever dream of, could have been the perfect subject for comic books not that many years ago.

Since I have plenty of time on my hands, I'll start thinking about my superhero costume.

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.

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!

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

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.

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!

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.

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