24HBC at 18.00

Panorama from the main hall, Fuji. Looks best in full screen.

Let the hacking begin

We're are now at Hasseludden Yasuragi, getting ready for the 24 hours of hacking to begin. We've been treated to sushi and some great food, and most of us have marinated in the hot springs for some hours already. If you haven't visited Hasseludden yourself, you can check out Fuji, the big hall where the hacking takes place, below. Looks best in full screen.



You can follow the live reporting from 24 Hour Business Camp at http://www.24hbc.se/live/. It will be in Swedish for most of the time, though. The hacking begins at 12.00 today, and the presentations of the projects begin 12.00 tomorrow.

24 Hour Business Camp III. Get ready!

Tomorrow at 17.30 the boat for 24 Hour Business Camp leaves from Strandvägen in Stockholm. Once again - for the third time! - it will take us out to Hasseludden Yasuragi outside Stockholm. You can read the full program here.

One thing that I think is super-great about this year's camp is that Joakim Jardenberg and Björn Falkevik will be broadcasting live from Hasseludden, at a number of occasions. So if you're not there yourself, you can still be with us in spirit. The one thing you really shouldn't miss is live presentation of the finished projects - it starts at 11.45 on tuesday. (24hbc.se will keep you in the loop.)

Since the official organizer of 24HBC this year is the Internet Infrastructure Foundation in Sweden, .SE, I think that we don't have to worry about the the quality of the internet connection at Hasseludden. But you never know ;)

Really look forward to meeting all the participants, organizers and sponsors tomorrow. If you're a participant you can read some of my previous blog posts. Practical advice, and what to bring:

• Några praktiska tips
• Min packning inför förra campet

Though the only thing you really need to bring this year is probably a toothbrush and your laptop. See you soon!

Reviews. Who do you trust?

Today at the office, we had a discussion about the distribution of grades on review websites.

You see, common knowledge is that the distribution of reviews take the shape of the letter U. That means: many people give negative reviews, many people give positive reviews, and less people give reviews in between. That's the distribution you usually see when you go to places like the App Store. Lots of 1:s and 5:s. Some people love your app, some people hate it. You've probably seen the pattern yourself.

However, I felt this agreed-upon knowledge would be false when it comes to social recommendation sites, such as Tripbirds. Somehow, I just felt people on a social recommendation sites would behave differently.

To get some data to support my case I made a quick analysis of all the reviews from my Swedish restaurant review site, Restaurangkartan. 13.000 reviews on a scale of one to five stars. And then - a very interesting pattern emerged.

The dark red line is people who just gave one review. That's the people who stop by the site once, write a review, and then never return. For these people, there was a clear U-shape distribution.

Then I looked at people who gave more than one review. That's when things got interesting. Quickly, a very super-clear pattern emerged. There's a straight correlation between the number of reviews someone's written and the distribution of those reviews.

As a matter of fact for people who write many reviews, the distribution is inverted. The shape looks not like a U, but rather like an A.

The more reviews people write, the less likely those reviews are to be either 1:s or 5:s.

So what's the conclusion? Well, it's about trust. On my restaurant site, when someone has written more than 10 reviews... that's when I start trusting them. If someone has written fewer, chances are that they are not really trustworthy. The worst example is when you will find restaurant owners reviewing their own places, and writing bad reviews for their competitors. That's actually quite common. But there are also many other reasons why you can't really trust people with few reviews.

The real power of social recommendations is trust. You might not always agree with your friends but at least you can trust their intentions. This is actually the reason I wanted to leave the "web 2.0" and "crowdsourcing" mentality behind, and focus on social. It's much more powerful. That's why I'm so excited about Tripbirds.

And let's hope the U-shape distribution was just a historical parenthesis on the web. :)

Tripbirds field day

We are now 7 people working on Tripbirds. Read the interviews with Philip and Robert. More interviews coming soon. :)

Get your laps around the world

In the last few days you might have seen updates on Twitter on how many laps around the world people have traveled.

These trip stats are based on peoples checkins and pictures from Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla and Instagram. You can get your own stats through Tripbirds teaser page.

As with all early releases, we found a few bugs in our initial code that resulted in some people's trips not being recorded correctly. 40 cups of coffee later, these issues should have been fixed. You might want to check out your trip stats again.

By the way these was a nice picture from Tripbirds' office in todays paper edition of Svenska Dagbladet. There might be something on the web later as well. :)

Tripbirds - check out the teaser page

Today we are releasing a teaser-page for Tripbirds. I must say it's pretty sleek, so check it out.

The teaser page shows you how far you've traveled on Facebook. And if you've ever used Foursquare, Gowalla or Instagram you can connect and get your trips from those services as well. In the bigger perspective, it shouldn't matter which of all social services your friends use to keep track of their whereabouts. You should still be able to use Tripbirds.

Myself, I've traveled three quarters of a lap around the world. You might think that's quite far, but I have 45 friends who have traveled further. Maybe I'm not such a globetrotter after all.

One interesting thing about the teaser page is that behind the scenes our machines are doing a lot of heavy lifting - fetching thousands of trips and crunching tons of data every time someone connects. Jonatan, Robert and Philip (the developers) have really succeeded in making it all look so simple. Great work, guys.

Quite soon we are launching the full Tripbirds site, in private beta. By signing up for the teaser you make sure to be one of the first in line for the real thing.

If you want to help us out, don't forget to share your travel stats on Twitter:

You can also invite your top traveling friends on Facebook. Those are the people that will naturally get the most use out of Tripbirds.

Feedback? Problems? Please ping @tripbirds on Twitter. :)