We bought 15 iPhones in San Francisco last year for all our friends.

Yep, I’m serious. The other reasons for wanting an iPhone are valid too and apply to me too. It is the mother of all shiny objects, a great tool and a nice phone and you just want one as soon as you hold one in your hands. But besides that the iPhone platform is also clearly the start of something new. And I want to be a part of that.

Early Apple computers (before the Macintosh) had serial ports and something called a Game Port. It could be used for digital and analog input and output and was very powerful. People would buy an Apple I or Apple II and hack around with these ports to build exiting stuff like printers or home automation tools. Back then it was clear to people that you could build practicably anything with these machines if you had some basic hard- and software knowledge and that was an extremely exciting prospect.

Now we have the iPhone. A lot of people are complaining about the closed character of the iPhone but I see it differently. Sure, things could improve a lot. The NDA should go and the App store should work more transparent and all that. But look at the possibilities for a moment and you will realize just how empowering this little computer is!

The early Apple computers had serial ports that let people do anything with their computers which was cool. The box itself could do a few basic things which were exciting but still fairly limited. Now look at the iPhone: developers have access to the Internet, the GPS chip and all the motion sensors. The touch, tilt and move interface is all there waiting for you to take advantage of. All you have to do is come up with an application that uses a few of these, freely available, technologies and built it.

Better yet; you don’t even have to worry about setting up an eShop, coming up with license fees, promotion, illegal copies or how to make your invention available to users. The App store handles everything for you.

So what you have is a phenomenon with unlimited possibilities, free tools to build applications, an app store that handles distribution, promotion and security and millions of eager users who can’t wait to play with your products, and pay for them too.

It is not often that a revolution takes place where you get a chance to participate. It happened, and is still happening, with the Internet and now it has just started with a new platform called the iPhone.

I just couldn’t resist becoming a part of that.

That is a short version of that story as I have talked about it a lot before. What I wanted to talk about is how similar V3.com was to TwitterCounter.com. Don’t get me wrong: they served completely different purposes and technically they were very different too but there are a few very distinct similarities which I would like to show you:

V3.com	TwitterCounter.com
Yes, both services have a button. With V3 only people who were really happy with the service (a lot!) added this button to their homepages. At TwitterCounter you could say that the button IS the service so that makes this viral growth aspect even more powerful.
generated money from advertisement	generates money from advertisement
Well, that sorta makes sense right? The funny thing is that most people (now and then) don’t realize how powerful this service is when it comes to advertising. Both services are pretty low maintenance and with every new member you get a few extra new ad views a day. All you have to do is increase membership and with it ad views will increase as well.
Disgarded as ‘funny but not a real business’	Disgarded as ‘funny but not a real business’
Not that I’m complaining here but this one keeps amazing me. When I was working on V3.com I had to defend myself all the time. When I explained the concept I would either get a blank stare or people would say “You are out of your mind, this isn’t going anywhere, who would be interested in THAT’. I never understood that people couldn’t see the potential for the service. Same goes for TwitterCounter. Yeah, it’s a funny little thing I threw together in a few hours. But with every new member I get another banner, and link to TwitterCounter generating a few more visitors a day, generating a little more advertising revenue, and new members. Repeat that last sentence 10 times and you might get an idea of the potential behind TwitterCounter.
Weak spot: Domain prices?	Weak spot: Twitter future?
Another similarity is that there was a big weak spot that is easily recognizable in both services. At V3.com it was clear that as soon as domain names would become really cheap we wouldn’t really have a business left. At TwitterCounter I am completely depended of Twitter. If they stumble, close down, change their policies and become less open, or even lose their market share because of the Next Twitter I’m gone.
Excitement: high!	Excitement: high!
I’m really excited about Twittercounter in a very similar way as I was with V3.com. It is very exciting to browse the web and just randomly see your own product featured on blogs and websites. My partner in V3 (Hans-Poul) once told me he was driving around in his car and felt slightly depressed for no particular reason. When he stopped for a red light he looked out of his side window, through the rain, and saw a sign on a restaurant. In big yellow letters they had printed “Surf.to/Shoarma” on their window. He felt a lot better right away! I get a similar feeling when I brose to Leo Laporte’s website and see a TwitterCounter (leolaporte has 51,738 followers!) displayed prominently.

Ok, I hope that gives you some insight into what I liked about V3.com and currently like about TwitterCounter.com. To finish this post I will answer a question that you might have right now: Do I think that I will sell TwitterCounter for a lot of money (or shares) just like I did with V3.com?

The answer: I don’t know, but lets find out…

I noticed that most real-estate websites concentrate on these two moments (buy & sell) when it comes to home owners. All these websites try to make money when people want to buy or sell their house. That means that most people rarely need them.

My upstairs neighbors just sold their house. The price they got per square meter (€4191) means that my house almost doubled in value since we bought it 7 years ago. I hadn’t thought about that until my neighbors sold their house and I recalculated the value.

So that got me thinking. Could it be possible to build a service that appeals to home owners and keeps them up-to-date on the value of their house, what similar houses in the neighborhood get sold for, what their over-allowance is and if they can’t get a better mortgage based on the value of their house and the current interest rates.

There are a few variables that make it hard to predict the value of real-estate. But I’m just suggesting that we really predict values only based on square meters. What i would propose is that we take the last known valuation (you bought the house for how much?) and take that as a the basis. Then we look at what other houses in your area get sold for and based on that we could multiply the value of your house.

My guess (but I’m not that good with math so that is why this is an OpenIdea) is that the more houses are added to the database the more precise it will be able to predict the value of a house.

There will always be exceptions and factors that will influence the price of your house positively or negatively but those could be added as we find out about them. Lets say you buy a few extra square meters of garden or you find out that your roof is leaking. In the database you could say ‘Shape of building: needs work” which we could translate into “needs work = 5% off value”. A bigger garden would be “Square meters x average garden value + total value”.

I can image that if you have the last 6 transactions of a house and the houses around it, the current interest rates and a few more variables you could give people a pretty good estimate of the value of their houses.

I registered the domain name Taxati.com for this OpenIdea. In The Netherlands a ‘taxatie’ means ‘Appraisal’.

Although the math behind the calculations will be pretty complicated in the long term the basic system should be easy to build. People should be able to input a few values and their contact data and then we could send them a weekly update on the value of their house, including a few interesting deals to re-insure, re-mortgage or maybe just sell their houses.

Who wants to help me build it?

1: Captchatising.com
As you might have noticed on The Next Web Blog we use the names of our advertisers instead of random characters. Easier for people to understand, great for our advertisers and just as hard for spammers. Today Diederik persuaded me to actually start a new project to develop this for other blogs too. We will build the platform and try to attract advertisers to advertise on blogs hosting our CAPTCHAs. Now we only have to find someone to build it and someone to manage it. Interested?

2: 100 SEO Tips
This project is a lot less ambitious. With every WordPress install comes a plug-in titled ‘Hello Dolly’. It displays random sentences from the famous song with the same title. I took a look at it today and figured I could do something more useful with that technology. So I started a public spreadsheet at Google Docs titled “100 SEO tips” and asked people (via Twitter) to contribute Search Engine Optimization tips there. As soon as I have 100 tips collected I will publish this Plug-in to WordPress.org. If you want to contribute (I will link to you as a contributor) contact me and I will invite you to the document as an editor.

And with 85% of ALL my mail being spam (19.648 Good Messages, 111.961 Spam Messages (85%) on 405 Spam Messages Per Day) I spent a lot of time thinking about how to prevent any more from coming in.

Since January 2007 I have been using a fairly good Spam filter. It is 99.1% correct which means I have to wade my way through hundreds of spam messages every day to make sure I don’t miss stuff. So far I have rescued 869 messages from my spam folder our of a total of 111.961 spam messages.

Today I came up with a ‘sort of’ solution to the Spam problem. Maybe. Probably not.

It occurred to me that one of the reasons spam still works for spammers is the low cost of doing it. After all, it costs close to nothing to send millions and millions of spam messages and if only 0.001% of receivers click through you still make some money.

So what if we would give spammers what they want?

What if we would ALL start visiting every link in every spam message? The cost of sending out millions of spam messages would suddenly start to rise. Servers would go down, pages would become unresponsive and bandwidth costs would go up.

Spamming is cheap BECAUSE people DON’T click on the links in the spam messages!

I don’t propose we actually start buying v!@ggra (how DO you actually spell that?) and cheap Rolexes online. But how about a mail plugin that loads every link in every spam message I receive, oh, about 10 times? How about making this plugin free and easy to install? What if a few thousand or hundred thousand people would install this plugin?

I imagine a spammer one day sending out a few thousand spam messages and before he even gets one order for his product his server goes down.

Yeah I know, what if a legitimate message accidently ends up in the spam folder? Well, if it only ends up in 1 spam box there wouldn’t be any problems.

So is this a real solution? Probably not.

But one can dream, right?

Can you imagine how inconvenient that is? Ever since then I have been paying special attention to how people communicate their new addresses and have now decided to write a ‘How to’ about the subject.

So, are you planning on moving to another company? Changing your email address? Phone-number? Feel the need to send your friends and acquaintances a personal note about this upcoming change? Here are my 5 tips to do it efficiently:

1: get a Plaxo account.
Plaxo works very simple. You enter your details there and so do lots of other people (15+ million). Now instead of changing your contact data everywhere you only change it online and everybody who is connected to you via Plaxo also gets your new contact data. It is a great system and I look forward to they day they have 5 billion customers and my address-book will always be up to date. Unfortunately some people really dislike Plaxo which brings me to tip 2.

2: get a temporary Plaxo account.
Even if you don’t like Plaxo many other people do. And it is by far the easiest way to change your data in a lot of your contacts addressbooks. Simply get an account, enter your correct data. Keep it like that for a week or so and then log out again. No need to stay connected to Plaxo all the time.

3: Don’t send raw data
Even if you send me your new contact data as text in a message I still have to copy page each line to my AddressBook. That is way to inconvenient. Please use the excellent vCard format. See next tip.

4: Send a vCard
vCards are simple XML files with your contact data in it. Most applications can read this format straight out of the box. If I get a vCard attached to an email message I simply double-click it and it is opened and added to my AddressBook:

Uploaded with Skitch!

You can generate a vCard in most applications simply by selecting your own record and selecting ‘Export’ and then choosing the vCard format. But if that is too difficult for you you can also generate your own vCard: http://vcardmaker.wackomenace.co.uk/

5: Upload a vCard
Not everybody can receive attachements. Some Firewalls or mailservers strip away any message they don’t recognize. Upload your vCard to a server and supply the url. Here is mine (Right click and choose ‘Save link as…’ to download).

This is just a quick experiment: a public Twitter account which everyone can use to post anonymous updates. Simply email your thoughts to we_are_all@twittermail.com and it will appear online.

Check this page to see the first results: http://twitter.com/we_are_all

Almost More than 1000 people use TwitterMail.com right now and more than 4000 messages have been posted to Twitter.com with TwitterMail. Time to introduce something new!

Lennaert and Bram have been working on a ‘MSN to Twitter’ service and just launched their product (in beta, of-course) named TwitterMSN.com. I have been testing it today and it works flawlessly.

This is another feature that was sorely missing from Twitter.com and it is great that it is available now. Twitter.com also agrees and now adds the ‘TwitterMSN’ tag to every update that they receive via TwitterMSN.com.

If you use Twitter and MSN Messenger check it out: TwitterMSN.com.

Read all about the OpenIdea that led to TwitterMail.com.

What people are saying about TwitterMSN:

The Museum of Modern Betas
http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/beta/twittermsn

AccessoWeb: Twitter maintenant sur MSN
http://blog.accessoweb.info/post/Twitter-maintenant-sur-MSN

Nawak! le blog de Super Chinois: Twitter sans compter grâce à TwitterMSN
http://nawak.unotherblo… …e-a-twittermsn.html

Mashable: TwitterMSN Lets You Tweet from Your Chat Tool
http://mashable.com/2007/07/19/twittermsn/

HongKiat: How To Update Twitter Via MSN / Windows Live Messenger
http://www.hongkiat.co… …-windows-live-messenger/

FEEDMYAPP: TwitterMSN
http://www.feedmyapp.com/p/a/chat-tools-web-20-applications-sites-twittermsn/1031

Alcides Fonseca: One (more) good reason to twitter!
http://alcides.ideias3.com/blog/78

MiTripleW: Actualizar Twitter desde MSN
http://www.mitriplew.com/index.php/internet/2007/07/19/actualizar_twitter_desde_msn

StumbleUpOn: We received over 400 visitors from StumbleUpOn in less than 10 minutes.

KillerStartups: TwitterMSN.com – Tweets From Your MSN
http://www.killerstartups.com/WebAppTools/twitterMSN–Tweets-From-Your-MSN/

Adictos Web: TwitterMSN: Twittea desde el MSN y recibe las actualizaciones de tus amigos
http://adictosweb.blogspot.com/2007/07/twittermsn-twittea-desde-el-msn-y.html

Wappblog: TwitterMSN：让Twitter支持MSN
http://www.wappblog.com/50226711/twittermsnieetwittermsn_106528.php

playpcesor.blogspot.com: Twitter Mail and MSN：傳送、接收、增強你的Twitter
http://playpcesor.blogspot.com/2007/07/twitter-mail-and-msntwitter.html

BigBlueBall: TwitterMSN, actualizando Twitter desde MSN
http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/noticias-en-mi/40761-twittermsn-actualizando-twitter-desde-msn.html

BigSignals: TwitterMSN, twitteando desde el Messenger
http://bitsignals.com/2007/07/19/twittermsn-twitteando-desde-el-messenger/

ChemstudioWEB: Even MSN Is Able To Update Twitter
http://www.chemstudioweb.com/even-msn-is-able-to-update-twitter/

BNOX: MSN to Twitter
http://www.bnox.be/2007/07/msn-to-twitter.html

Geekissimo: TwitterMsn: inviare i messaggi su Twitter da Msn
http://www.geekissimo.com/2007/07/20/twittermsn-inviare-i-messaggi-su-twitter-da-msn/

Technology News Daily: TwitterMSN.com allows Tweets From Your MSN
http://news.techvine.org/2007/07/22/twittermsncom-allows-tweets-from-your-msn-3/

Windows Live: Twitteren via Messenger
http://livelog.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!F22E9E9D8F70E526!827.entry