Unicode domains are not very attractive. There are two reasons, on one hand they are not easy to type on the keyboard. Do you know how to type ✈.com in your URL bar?. On the other hand lots of computers don’t have support for Unicode characters, at least not a full set of grihps. The consensus is that Unicode domains are not practical for domains.

However things are changing. New computers and devices speak full Unicode. Nowadays most of the time we don’t type URLs but follow links. As Internet expands to people living on countries using “weird” languages, more and more people will be able to type comfortably Unicode domains. Most of the Unicode character set for Hindi, Thai, Lao, Tibetan, and Arabic languages is still free.

I registered a Unicode domain as experiment. I’m the proud owner of ௫.net. ௫ means ’5′ in the Tamil alphabet. I always loved ௫ because it looks like a reversed at symbol (‘@’). I used this domain for two months for a personal installation of a URL shortener. I used this domain to share links on twitter and facebook. You can test it, this article is shortened as http://௫.net/j. The results of the experiment? The domain is inconvenient to use. Many twitter clients fail to display or recognize the links. It is different. It’s a piece of art.

Unicode domains don’t have any commercial interest. Yet. Maybe they will never have it. Meanwhile you can register those domains for fun, to inflate your ego, or as investment. For the price of two cups of coffee per year, you can be the sole owner of a domain like ✈.com, ✆.com, ➀.net or ❤.org

Go to the list of Unicode characters in the Wikipedia and look for your favorite character. At this time most of the Chinese characters are still free!

Street Art with Unicode domains. (Via ♥.tk @ Flickr)

Dianping.com HQ

Some remarks:

• They have 1000 employees. Thay plan to have 1800 by the end of the year. I was really surprised when I heard those numbers. Everything in China is scaled up to the limit, this is an internet company but they hire people by the thousands. Labor in China is very cheap, but I do not really understand why do they need so many people. Twitter a couple of years ago were just 25 people and they are still less than 400 today.
• They do not have resources to develop and maintain and Open API for third parties, but they want to have it in the near future.
• They receive 30% of the traffic from mobile devices. They are full focused on mobile because they see the numbers are increasing very fast. They expect to have 70% of traffic from mobile devices by the end of the year. Their Android application comes pre-installed on 70% of branded android phones in China.

Many thanks to the e-business club at CEIBS for organize this visit.

Barcamp Shanghai Logo

But the most important thing is that I finally met the community in Shanghai. It takes time to do anything here when you don’t speak the local language and you don’t live at the right side of the river. The community in Shanghai is a very international mix of Hackers, Open Software fanatics, Apple zealots, masters of the electron and Social media gurus. All of them got together to share ideas and pizza.

All of them using my language.

Barcamp seating area.

Thanks to msittig for the picture.

The host gave us stickers, food and drinks. Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation was here and we spoke about the important role Firefox has from now on, providing a safe and clean browser for the masses.

In the Q&A, I asked a question about the huge problem Firefox faces in Korea. Here the Firefox penetration is very low and there is a good reason: Lots of Korean websites make heavy use of proprietary extensions in the form of Active X controls that can’t be used on Firefox.

I asked Mitchell if the Mozilla foundation has any plans to address this issue and Michelle told us that Firefox will never execute Active X controls because of the huge security hole they create. What they are doing to fix the problem is going through the political way, educating the people who take decisions .  I think is the correct way.

For example, Michelle was in Seoul this week because the next day she was going to attend a meeting with Korean ministers to request them to eliminate the need of the Active X controls in the government websites.

It was a fantastic technological party and hope to soon enjoy firefox 3.1 release party too!

UPDATE: I’ve just added a group picture I founded on flickr

Simyo also treated us for lunch. We had the opportunity to discuss about Simyo and the future of our applications. Simyo’s team is very powerful and enthusiastic and they have a pretty cool work environment.

Furthermore the old video was really boring. It was a mistake to produce a 16 minutes long video and pretend to get your attention in this time of if-it’s-longer-than-a-minute-I’m-not-going-to-see-it (Youtube mantra?).

So I produced a new video showing the new UI and I cut the important sections of old video. Now I have 4 independent videos in the form of small pills of 5 minutes each. Shorter. Easier to see. Faster to get to the point. Better.

I lost the introduction of the old video though, so if you are new and you don’t know what I’m speaking of, please look the first part of the original video.

These are the videos (Still in spanish):

1. The improved user interface (4:50 minutes) New video
2. Explanation of how the system works (1 minute)
   
3. Demo with softphones,landline and cell phone (4:18 minutes)
   
4. Potential commercial and virality (5 minutes)

What happened with AOL, Compuserve and Infovia in middle 90′ is that they created a lot of content in a proprietary and inoperable way. High quality (by that time) message, chat and web publishing applications. In US that kind of systems were the first contact with internet for millions of people. In Spain Infovia was the closed network that provide the infrastructure for the first providers and Internet companies.

But when the magic of the open protocols like http gain a critical mass, everybody wanted to surf on the primitive wild internet instead of surf on a controlled closed bubble. Some years were necessary before the quality of the new and open internet was on par with the previous proprietary versions but it didn’t mattered. At the end, AOL, Compuserve and Infovia accepted the new situation, took to pieces the closed networks, and mutated as normal providers or disappeared.

Now we are in a similar situation. We have a lot of different social networks but all of them are inoperable between them. For example, you can’t write a profile on Facebook and make it automatically appear on Bebo. You update an event on Tuenti and it don’t magically update also Facebook. You tell twitter what are you doing but Facebook didn’t realize that unless you install glue in the middle.

In my opinion there are two big problems here. On one hand the local social networks with local content are always going to be stronger if they are big enough to be interesting for their users. That means that it’s impossible for a single company to have all the social network users in the world, because the people will always prefer a localized version. Facebook don’t have anything to do in Korea and Japan if they don’t place cute hello kitties all over the website. In the case of my country, I think that if there is a well designed Spanish social network (Tuenti anyone?) is going to be very difficult for Facebook to gain a important market share because the people is lazy to update more than one service. And the more popular service will be always used because it just works.

On the other hand, the social networks believe that all their value is on the information of their user’s profiles. The bigger the network the bigger the business. In my opinion that is completely flawed because is not entirely true. The more people, the more interesting content the site has so it attract more visits, which means more advertisement so you get more money. But only *having* that information on itself *has not value*, you need to offer something interesting before.

Two things can happen. The companies can buy each others in a movement resemblance of the internet bubble or simply glue their databases and create bigger networks. That means interconnect their networks. It won’t matter because the history tell us that it’s inevitable for an open protocol to appear.

So what will happen if a well designed open social network protocol appear in the next months? New companies will start to work together to make reality a decentralized global social network. And new business models will appear, with the objective of creating applications for a common global social network. And new buzzwords. Web 4.0 at least. Who knows!.

And meanwhile, Facebook, bebo and the bigger social networks will need to adopt the common global network, the global resource or die. Like AOL did.

The virtual worlds are another interesting case. The biggest contender is Second Life, but it may appear another competitors using open protocols in the future. If you have the option of creating an island with your own content hosted in your computer or creating it on the closed servers of Second Life using and paying for the official content what will you choose? Did this sound similar to creating a website for AOL/Compuserve/Infovia or creating it on the web?

Social networks like we know now are doomed.

Now we only need to decide what open protocol we’ll use.

What had the application improved this last week?

1. Better architecture. I split the web frontend (the web application you can see on facebook) completely of the VoIP backend (the call manager) on two different servers running on different locations. Now the application is ready to scale.
2. Way better sound quality. AMG (a local network service provider) lent me a provisional SIP account, more than enough to improve 1000% call’s reliability and sound quality. I need more accounts for reliability reasons, though, is someone interested?
3. Completely new user interface. Polished, a lot more integrated on facebook, making use of facebook widgets. A long way to go, though, but a lot better than the pre-release version you could saw on video last week. Now it’s time for user usability reporting and web2.0 effects
4. Multilingual. The application works, so what is the reason to reduce their commercial potential focusing only on the Spanish market? No reason. As facebook didn’t provide yet the multilingual capabilities I designed the application to understand Spanish and English, and Vasque, French and German translations are coming soon. Catalian anyone?
5. Developer corner. I’m the only one developer but I like to work on a complete environment. Nowadays the application had a subversion repository, a wiki with my last thoughts and documentation and a bug reporting software for me and betatesters (some techie friends)
6. Bugfixing. Lots and lots of bugs had been resolved, and lots of new ones are being fixed every single day.

I continue to have ideas to improve the functionality or reliability of the application. I’m thinking in several cool improvements. I don’t know if the application will be ready to enter an open beta state on time (maybe by the middle of next week?) but for sure at the beginning it will have less functionality than other VoIP applications.

Don’t complain! It’s working, it’s a complex system with lots of components and has been programmed on a garage

I’ve made a video showing how it works, what you can do with it and the commercial possibilities and monetization of the application. The video speaks Spanish but I’ll dub the video if there is demand.

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I expect the judges to like my application!

The software is based in the VoIP java prototype I programmed for my final research project but only in the experience I adquired because I ended hating java as much that I developed this new one entirely in PHP. I’m in love with scripted languages.

At the end the big problem has not been the software but the hardware. Right now I’m still configuring the machine that runs the VoIP backend. I expect to finish as soon as possible so I can polish the web interface of the application.

Programming the application has been a lot of fun because programming for facebook is easy as cake and mixing web developing and VoIP technologies is super atractive for me (And I think is going to be a huge bussiness in the next years). Plus the motivation of the conquest it’s pretty interesting indeed

Javier Olivan, of facebook (maybe the only spanish guy there?)

After the general presentation a bunch of local businesses introduced several applications. One of them interesting and very well localizated (la porra) and others losing the main point of Facebook. While in Canada I installed the facebook developer application and I read a bit of the documentation. It’s easy to build “something” making use of the viral marketing so it’s possible that I will burn some time playing with the platform in the following months.

Martin Varsavsky speaking about facebook and of course fon. If we owe something to Martin is his insistence in making visible the Spanish bussinesses in Silicon valley and the rest of the world.

I don’t know how important will be facebook in Spain but maybe they arrived a bit late. Now there are several facebook clones and at least one of them (tuenti) is almost a exact clone of the facebook’s core applications from the user pointview. However Tuenti don’t have as much users as facebook and more important, they don’t have the cool API for developers facebook has, which can be something that move the scale to facebook’s side the second the spanish teenagers discover all the stupid crap games facebook has in their application directory.