Winter

Just wanted to share with you what we saw today when we looked out our office window. Snow in Bremen, Germany just before Christmas!? Sweet timing, but I’m sure it’ll be gone by tomorrow. Anyways, happy holiday to you and yours.

The Guardian

James Harkin wrote an interesting article about future trends called The Shape of Things to Come for the English daily newspaper The Guardian. Very interesting article, especially the bit where he mentions iliketotallyloveit.com:

The new vicarious consumption

Ambitious futurologists need credible buzzwords, but good ones are in perilously short supply. One option is to take an old trend off the peg, dust it down a bit and give it a whole new twist. The idea of “vicarious consumption” was first coined 100 years ago by the economist Thorstein Veblen to describe the thrill rich people get when they buy their butler a lovely new uniform. Nowadays, reckons Evers, it is making a comeback in a whole new form. Just as book reviews have become a substitute among many of us for reading books, Evers says, our enthusiasm for endless product reviews is becoming a way through which we can vicariously experience almost anything through the eyes (and sometimes ears) of people who have already been there. Sites dedicated to reading reviews on other people’s experiences, such as iliketotallyloveit.com and ballofdirt.com, offer a heady mixture of entertainment, voyeurism and exhibitionism, and are already quietly attracting millions on the web.

Thanks a lot James for thinking of us.

Please help and vote

Please help us out, click on the link above and vote as often as you like for iliketotallyoveit.com until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 16th.

iliketotallyloveit on the 2nd position in Germany

Jochen Krisch of the German ecommerce blog Exciting Commerce took Blognation’s Markus Spath’s article “The 100 Most Popular Web 2.0 Sites From Germany” and used it to compile a list of Germany’s most successful (social) shopping sites. It turns out that we are on the 2nd rank right behind the world-famous Spreadshirt. Pretty nice to look at, but it’s only based on how often a service has been bookmarked on del.icio.us. Spath says

(…) it is hard to find significant metrics for measuring the popularity of sites, it’s even harder to access reliable data for any metric for all sites. Going with del.icio.us is straightforward, but not necessarily an indicator for a large number of active users, traffic or economic potential.

Sites which are available in English do have a competitive advantage at del.icio.us compared to sites which are in German only. Sites which have been around for a while have an advantage compared to services which launched this year or a few weeks ago. A few of the most popular sites in this list are useful and focused but rather smallish tools which attracted a lot of bookmarks because they made it on del.icio.us’ hotlist. The list misses a few popular or interesting services, but overall the heuristics works fine.

You can always argue what statistics like this are good for – check Read/Write Web’s write-up on the statistic – but at least they help you to get of your bed on a gloomy morning like the one we had today.

We moved!!

We moved into our new office yesterday. You will get a tour in a little while, but until then you can check out the very nice location just outside the historic district of Bremen:

And of course we didn’t miss out on celebrating the move last night. On the following pictures you can see how that looked like — it might actually be the first picture of all the founders published in this blog.