At DLD today there was an interesting discussion, moderated by Hans-Peter Siebenhaar, between several telecom heavyweights amongst whom European Commissioner Viviane Reding and Rene Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom. These two were arguing about competition being the primary means for getting to a situation where we have abundant and cheap wireless broadband all over Europe. Obermann’s point was that he has to invest a double-digit billion euros to build the required infrastructure, but that he can not do that as long as the European Commission wants him to let other service providers compete over that very same network with a government mandated pricing structure. I fully understand that point. What he wants however, a license and a monopoly on the use of that license, is very wrong as well in my opinion. But as long as governments (and the EC) insist on auctioning off artificially scarce spectrum, Obermann’s points remain valid, unfortunately.

But why do we auction off spectrum in the first place? It would seem to me that it would be far better to declare all available spectrum free to be used by anyone. That would be the perfect breeding ground for successes similar to Wi-Fi, but then on a much larger scale. No auctioning was required there… And nobody HAS to build a double-digit billion dollar infrastrucure. It will probably become a distributed effort by many, based on standards, software defined radio , wireless mesh networking, etc.

So the EC, governments and Deutsche Telekom are all thinking in their own (short term) interest, not our long term interest. As long as that does not change, these discussion won’t end. There will be no cheap abundant wireless broadband when we do not change spectrum policies radically to begin with.

After a weekend recovering from a very successful, but also very exhausting, second edition of PICNIC we are now putting all vidoes of the event online. This weekend they were already available throughout the website, but here you will find an overview of all streams (full description later today). Note that some streams contain multiple sessions and lectures, edited versions of all individual sessions will be available on the website in a few weeks in cooperation with amongst others FORA.tv. Not everything has been recorded at PICNIC’07, only the main conference programme has been covered completely. I’m really sorry for having missed certain sessions myself and not being able to watch them online afterwards, something we will definitely have to do better next year;-) However, don’t forget to take a look at YouTube, Flickr and the PICNIC Aggregator for a lot more video, audio and other multimedia reports.

PICNIC’07 has started and you can watch it live through this website. The broadcast will start tomorrow at 2PM (GMT+2), you can find the programme here.

While Marc Canter is writing an open letter to Facebook’s Mark Zukerberg about taking the final step towards Facebook becoming what Dave Winer calls “the API the Internet never had — identity”, Six Apart announces they are opening the ‘Social Graph’ demoing a solution that uses XFN, hCard and FOAF. Recent developments already pointed that way and I hope this announcement speeds up evolution in this space since everyone understands the future must be different compared to today’s mess. The problem however is that there are incumbents that have something to lose, at least that’s probably how they think about it today. Next week during PICNIC (which I’m helping to organize) we will have a session on this topic, involving a.o. Marc Canter, Dick Hardt from Sxip Identity and Biz Stone from Twitter.

Today Adobe announced their support for H.264 in Flash Player 9. To you that might seem like some technical nitty-gritty, but the impact of this news on distributing and consuming video on the web could be very high. Flash Player is installed by 97% of web users and Adobe will drop their proprietary FLV format for an industry standard, which includes HD-support. For a better explanation, go read this post.

“Your media company has made or is about to make a significant investment into web video or video archiving. You are wondering what format you should choose. Video for Flash reaches everyone now, but the format is not an ‘industry standard’ so you have the fear that content you will create will become obsolete and unsupported at some point. Flash Player 9 Update 3 comes to the rescue: MPEG-4 is an extremely well documented ISO standard and completely vendor independent. And by using the Flash Player now you get instant gratification for viewers.”

A while ago I wrote about ‘communicating new style’ due to the very visible trend to use social networking services for communicating with your friends instead of (primarily) email. Facebook makes the next logical step in the same direction, Facebook email. But this surely won’t be the endpoint, there’s still a lot to wish for when it comes to creating the ultimate communications platform…

“Last month I suggested that Facebook may be launching an email application. Today, Facebook took a huge step in that direction. Facebook announced a new feature that allows users to write messages to their friends that aren’t currently using Facebook from within the messaging system. Not only can they send; they can receive as well. Even if your friend is not a Facebook member, they can now reply to your messages.“

Over at ClikZ Sean Carton suggests that the fact that social networking services like Facebook generate billions of pageviews doesn’t necessarily mean they are all monetizable. Or that an advertiser should want to advertise on such properties in traditional (read: intrusive) ways using banners, overlays, etc. It’s something I’ll be working on a lot in my new job at Hyves, Holland’s largest social networking service. And although the solution direction is not that surprising, stay close to user behavior on such sites and add value to the experience, it’s not going to be easy to execute this well. So we should provide the instruments to at least make it easier… More on those later.

“What’s this got to do with social-networking advertising? Everything. Search marketing works because it understands search’s essential nature: people looking for stuff. Where social networking advertising (at least the passive model that uses banners or, in many cases, contextual advertising) falls down is it fails to recognize the essential nature of social networking. People come to hang out with other people. Anything that gets in the way ruins the experience and will be avoided.”

Wired makes a clear statement on what the future of social networking (services) will look like. Open, open and open. That future is inevitable, Marc Canter explains it here again. I very much believe in this future as well, and given my new job at Hyves (the largest Dutch social networking service) I’m sure I won’t be bored very soon;-)

“At this point, “friend” relationships remain unique to the social networks. The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people’s identities on the internet. The absence of this secret sauce — an underlying framework that connects “friends” and establishes trust relationships between peers — is what gave rise to social networks in the first place. While we’ve largely outgrown the limitations of closed platforms (take e-mail or the web itself), no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on the internet at large.”

There’s an ongoing discussion, activated by Jason Calacanis, Om Malik and Robert Scoble. I had a similar discussion with my family over the weekend while sailing. But to be honest, there is no answer to that questions. Everyone decides for themselves. However, it is clear that services like Facebook will have to keep on evolving in order to meet new and ever changing demands and needs from users. Maar het is duidelijk dat de diensten zullen moeten evolueren om te blijven voldoen aan specifieke wensen van gebruikers. Something Michael Parekh is also suggesting.

“So imagine if one could add anybody to your “friend” network on Facebook. But instead of checking on a button that only allows them to see your “Limited Profile” today, you also have a check-box that says “casual acquaintance”. That definition is not visible to anyone else but you. But checking it simply adds the contact automatically into a category that limits them to seeing only your public feeds (as in Pownce), AND gives you tools to build that relationship into a meaningful contact over time.”

When I explain to people that users of MySpace or Facebook are using those platforms to interact & send message to each other, most won’t understand. “We’ve got email, right…?” But there’s a lot wrong with email, and it’s short on features as well. Jeremiah wrote a nice post about this, the advantages are too appealing to just ignore this development…

“The bottom line? Messaging is evolving and now has stronger network hooks, understanding these changes are key to being an effective communicator. The company trying to reach an audience on Facebook will obviously have to join this community and adapt to their tools.”