Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

OpenIdea: Nameo.org

Privacy is overrated. I have said it before and I will say it again. The future of the web is about removing anonymity, not extending it. I love it when I enter my favorite bar and the barman yells "Hi Boris, the usual?". We want to be known and recognized. Not anonymous. We want our 15 minutes of fame and share our experiences with the world. Arjen told me about an idea to make the web less anonymous. I loved it and persuaded him to let me blog about it in OpenIdea format. So here it...

TwitterMail: Live!

After a bumpy ride we can finally declare TwitterMail live. Moving the domain from one server to the other 48 hours before launch wasn't too smart. Oh well... But it all seems to work fine now! Give it a try if you want and please give me feedback here. So far more than 100 people are using it and we hope this will grow rapidly from now on. And why shouldn't it? A few tips: - Receive notifications of replies: If someone adds your username to their post we will send you that message via...

TwitterMail.com – Alive and Kicking

Tomorrow TwitterMail.com will be officially launched. I, and a bunch of other people, have been testing it all weekend and I'm confident it will work just great. The official launch won't be that spectacular but we do plan to contact some blogs and news-sites and try to get a small buzz going. I will use this post to collect links to articles written about TwitterMail. If I forget any please let me know. The first one: Bright.nl: TwitterMail maakt mobiel twitteren nog...

TwitterMail.com in 9, 8, 7…

A few months ago I posted an OpenIdea here titled "OpenIdea: twittermail.com" in which I proposed that someone would build a simple 'email to Twitter.com engine'. It took a while but 3 days ago Lennaert and Bram contacted me with a plan to actually build Twittermail. They started on Sunday and I expect them to finish the whole thing before the end of the week. In fact, it already works but they are adding some extra features and polishing the site. I have been using the service for a few...

Copy/Paste/Fetch?

There are a few things you do a lot on a computer and one of them is Copying and Pasting content. And these concepts haven't changed much over the last decades. I would like to have this extra feature, next to copying and pasting, in my Operating System: Fetch Lets assume I need a quote to go with this blog. I switch to my browser, search for quotes in Google, find one, select it, copy it, then have to find my way back to the application I was using and my draft blog post, find the place I...

OpenIdea: Banking 2.0

A few years ago I switched banks with all my accounts because my old bank didn't offer Electronic or web-based banking. I love being able to do all my finance transactions from the comfort of my browser. But since then I haven't seen much, or any, improvement in online banking. A few years ago I had a meeting at a large bank and told them how I thought they could improve their products. I'm sure they are still thinking about it and will keep on thinking about it for a good 10 years. So...

OpenIdea: Idlster.com – ScreenSavers

An old friend reminded me of this idea I had almost 10 years ago (1996 to be precise) to build a Screen Saver for companies. Not just any Screen Saver but a sort of Subliminal Advertising Screen Saver that people would actually like using. When the Screen Saver would be activated it would show you a range of facts that are related to the amount of time it has been running. Here are a few examples: an average of two Barbie dolls are sold every second a Moët & Chandon cork pops...

OpenIdea: TwitterMail.com

Here is an idea: Lets register twittermail.com (yes, it is available) and use MailTwitterPHP to set up a service for users of Twitter to redirect email to their twitter account. Get it? A user submits his or her Twitter account details at twittermail.com and gets a unique new emailaddress (alskhdftyyeoindhdfiewosnshjfkdfs@twittermail.com). From that moment on each message this user emails to this unique and secret emailaddress is posted to their own Twitter account. Shouldn't be...