Welcome
Welcome to Thomas Koeppen Blog. messaging and social.
It is amazing how to get latest information about worldwide news.
The mixture of ning and twitter made it possible to get recent news on Gustav (gustav08.ning.com).
I read on Twitter, that Gustav is now a category 5 storm before i saw it in TV.
Maybe in some months we Twitter feeds as headlines at CNN or N-TV.
Congratulations to this new Twitter song:
just found at Ben Walkers ihatemorning Blog; cannot really agree
with his domain name, i love mornings; but the song is great. Good social advertisement.
There started an interesting discussion on user experience with OpenId. 
Chris Saad suggested on his blog: “using email as OpenID” (published 22 Aug 2008).
That’s a really good idea.
All non-tech people must be confused to enter a URL as identifier on login screens and everybody knows his email-address quite well and use it very frequently.
Another idea: why not use a mobile number (MSISDN) as OpenID identifier for logins?
everybody has one or more mobile numbers and it can also be used with a handshake-SMS to handle user verification.
Easy to use, best user experience, well known and MSISDNs are unique.
I know, that there were some experiments on mobile OpenId earlier this year, yet:
The OpenID mobile experience (published on factoryjoe in January 2008).
OpenId has with email identifier a huge potential for identification.
Image is attributed to wordle.net
The US NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the olympic opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people to their computers by finding videos or TV broadcasting on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites or on Youtube.
NBC’s visitors could not see live pictures from Peking.
More than hundreds of clips were uploaded to YouTube.
As the newspager “New York Times” reported on Saturday NBC tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video.
A lot of blogs commented with a lack of understanding to this NBC tactic.
NBC said, making real money is only possible broadcasting such an event at primetime.
Good, we all have a global internet environment without country barriers to watch TV on foreign broadcaster or online at Youtube.
Obama Supporters Prefer Firefox:
We’ve had about 500,000 visitors over the past 3 months, of which 61% use Firefox, 23% use IE, and 11% use Safari. Opera and some browsers I haven’t heard about before make up the rest of the traffic.
This is a trend, we can see in Germany for years: the tremendous growth of Firefox usage.
Other Resources:
Mozilla Labs this week took steps to open up its idea factory to wider outside input, asking for community help to develop the next big ideas that might power future browsers. Like any good research lab, the goal is not an immediate product but a set of innovative ideas that can be played with and debated without the pressure of an immediate implementation
The Concept Series aims to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.
The most important concept for me is:
* stable
* fast
* handling much more than 20 tabs parallel
* secure browsing
* playing flash under Ubuntu slim and fast
Today Firefox 3 is sometimes much CPU consuming with Ubuntu and instable playing flash sites.
Firefox 3.0 was a big step in this direction of performance optimization!
A cool new feature might be the Firefox extension Snowl.
It’s a prototype Firefox extension that integrates messaging into the browser. It integrates RSS/Atom and twitter.
Please, no more features to Firefox Core, simple make in faster as my favorite browser!
Google is testing a very Digg-like interface
This video shows a user interface being bucket tested by Google to select (probably randomly determined) users. (recorded by Adrian Pike, CTO of Tatango).
Users vote search results up or down – a down vote makes it disappear with a “poof,†an up vote moves the result to the first page.
Google is also testing comments, with linked user names, and others can vote those comments up and down. In effect, this test shows a Google that combines their search algorithm with every important feature of Digg.
It’s something they’ve been working on for nearly a year in various iterations.
In near future they will add it to their Google Search experimental site, so we all can test it.
It is quite clear, that Google will add social search feature to their more and more spam-overwhelming crawling search result to optimize search results by user recommendation.
I think, Google will try to be a social search provider, but is Google really trustworthy to compete with the viral efficiency of independent services like StumbleUpon or Digg.
Holy Iphone!
Apple earned last weekend with iPhone 3G sales an estimated $330 million in profits over three days.
Is there too much hype with the iPhone? People need to get back to real life?
Has anybody counted how many blog entries to IPhone were created in the last 7 days ?
Twitter seems to be flooded with IPhone tweets.
Back to the real life: we love our IPhone 1.0 with good well-done metallic case.
There were impressive stats one Iphone tweets in comparison to Nokia and Blackberry on Twist – see trends in twitter:
Friday, 11 July 2008, weekly
Friday, 11 July 2008, monthly
note: this is neither an advertisement for Axel Springer nor for Apple …
Mr. Doepfner, CEO of Axel Springer tells people to have more fun at work with Apple. Every company should know what people love and everybody knows: working with a mac and its software is really fun!
see Mathias Doepfner’s video message at YouTube
video summary:
- dear employees:
.. i present you an it decision
.. all workstations will be migrated to Apple
.. AxelSpringer will be the largest Apple customer in Europe
.. AxelSpringer will be the second largest Apple customer worldwide after Google
.. what you see is what you get
.. Apple produce the most beautiful products
.. your desk will look better with an Apple product on it
.. enjoy every new morning with your new Apple product
.. better prices for our company
.. advantages for you, somebody of you will need to learn the new usability
.. it is not only an IT decision, it forces cultural change of our company
.. you will have more fun at your work!
offtopic: Axel Springer launches a new homepage design today, unfortunately i cannot view all their homepage data 
A CNET survey in June 2008 found that half of the instant messaging services provide full encryption:
We found that only half of the services provide complete encryption: AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, IBM’s Lotus Sametime, and Skype do. To their credit, not one service says it keeps logs of the content of users’ communications (a certain lure for federal investigators or snoopy divorce attorneys). For connection logs, Microsoft alone said it keeps none at all—though Google and Skype said their logs were deleted after a short time.
Interesting is, that in AOL’s third instant messaging survey nothing is mentioned about security from user perspective.
Top IM Uses Include:
Interest in Future Features:
Security and privacy should be a major user requirement to help secure private and work communication.
Experienced users use for example plugins like pidgin-otr (off-the-record messaging) to secure their instant messages.