Vinny Lingham’s Blog

I just discovered that Facebook now allows you to create and organise your friends into lists! This is fantastic as I have over 1,000 friends, and often not all of them are close enough that I want to monitor daily! This will really allow users to have better control over what they see, and from whom. I was getting a bit annoyed with not being able to create lists such as “Family” or “Business Contacts”.

This will really turn Facebook into a far more viable tool for managing social network contacts, IMHO.

I’ve been going on quite a bit recently about the changes in the economics of delivering software as a service, particularly relating to Cloud Computing – which leads me to a great article that came out this weekend from the New York Times, on the impending battle between Google & Microsoft.

SynthaSite launched our Alpha on Amazon’s EC2 cloud, and it held up perfectly – although it was not easy to scale the application architecture and we’re going to work on that – so in the interim we’re using some standard servers while we build out our virtualization infrastructure.

The future of the software is certainly in the cloud and delivered through the browser – Microsoft is not arguing about that – but they would prefer to ensure that it’s tied to the desktop in some way (and obviously IE). With the fragmentation that’s occurring as a desktop level (Linux, Mac, Ubuntu, etc), I doubt that this is a good long term strategy (in fact, they’re actually missing the plot totally) – especially given what a flop Vista is. That said, the article above is a great read!

The thing that really concerns me, is that if Microsoft really believes that applications should live in the browser – then why do they build IE only applications (such as Office Live). It’s really frustrating to not have cross browser compatibility – the browser is the new operating system, believe it or not…

I’ve really been busy this past month so apologies for the light posting – from closing the recent SynthaSite deal to all the paperwork involved with moving to the US West Coast – it’s been one very busy month. I thought I’d just write a piece and give feedback on how SynthaSite has been doing and what our users are up to!

I’m actually thrilled by the level of interest that SynthaSite has been receiving (and thanks to all my fellow bloggers for their support!). We have signed up over 11,000 users this year, who have produced thousands of websites – with the most unique and unimaginable user generated content.

Here are some of the thousands of sites that our users have created so far :

SAT Bootcamp (Using 3rd party forms creatively to capture leads)
Team69Racing (Someone from my hometown )
Spay Pet (Using Google AdSense)
Parallels vs Bootcamp (Using some nifty HTML to create tables)
Amazon Webstore (using syndicated content from Amazon)
Carbo Rocket (E-Commerce enabled using PayPal)
African Dream Holidays (Microsite for African Dream Holidays, an incuBeta company)

We’re stunned by the ingenuity of our user base – we haven’t even gotten out the gates yet, relatively speaking, and people are really testing the depths of our platform! This is really great to see – and it makes all the hard work very much worth it!

User Generated Content (UGC) is a pivotal part of Web 2.0 in that it demonstrates how users are participating and having a voice on the web. I’m really excited about the year ahead, and I’m looking forward at demonstrating the power of SynthaSite as we open it up to a world of users that have a need for a website, but never wanted to pay for hosting, domains, etc.

Interestingly enough – 5 out of the top 10 countries that we have users in, are from emerging markets (BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China & South Africa) – which points to how starved these countries are for free Internet services such as hosting (in South Africa – bandwidth and hosting is frighteningly expensive). If you think of the volumes of users from these countries, and couple that with the fact that high costs of Internet is actually holding back UGC on platforms such as YouTube, etc – over time, as prices drop, the Internet is going to explode – what you’re seeing today is just the beginning!

Nope, not the chocolate (South African joke). TechCrunch is having the inaugural “Crunchies” awards and you can nominate for your favorite Web 2.0 Startup.

Awards like these certainly help give startup companies more exposure – especially ones that deserve and need it – so nominate away!

I found this on TechCrunch today – and I just had to share it!

Sad thing is that most of those 23 year old CEO’s & CTO’s won’t even know who first wrote and sang the background song

Update (15 Dec): YouTube video removed (long story) – replaced with Daily Motion video.