Interviewing Adegga

Adegga [1] is a new Web 2.0 social network, made by a team of three Portuguese guys, and - as the name says - it is all about Wine.

Currently in private beta, I'm lucky to have an account there, and am already a regular user. Remember when I said that I wish there was a Last.fm for books [2]? Well, Adegga is Last.fm for wines.

So, instead of reviewing it, I did something different: here's an interview I made to one of Adegga's folks, André, and if you feel like trying it out, just leave a comment here and I'll send you an invite! :-)

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First and foremost, please tell us what Adegga is, in your own words.

Adegga is an online service that help people discover and choose wine by sharing their wine opinions with other people they trust. By creating a personalized watchlist people can "follow" what their friends, favorite producers and wine shops are doing. Adegga also helps people organize their wines by keeping track of wines they taste, make a wishlist or organize your home cellar. For searching for wines and checking prices no account is needed.

What gave you the idea of creating this service?

A few years ago the three founders, André R, André C. and Emídio, started enjoying wine together and sharing their opinions. A few months later André R. while reading the the book The Long Tail designed the idea that would become the project Adegga and invited his 2 friends to build it.

There are other wine (or more generic beaverages) social networks... Why should someone use Adegga instead of one of the alternatives?

There are 3 main reasons that can make people choose Adegga and not other social network:

• Watchlist. Adegga lets you build a personalized watchlist so that you can keep track of what people on your list are choosing and tasting. You can add friends, wine bloggers, producers and just about anyone else. You can also add wine producers and wine shops to your personalized watch list so that you keep track of when a producer releases a new wine or a wine shop makes a promotion.
• Wine prices: Adegga gets wine prices from shops around the world and puts them directly on each wine page. This makes it easy to check availabilty and price for any wine.
• Profiles: Being a social network Adegga build a profile page for each producers. Besides all the information about a producer you can also add this producer to your Watchlist and follow what he is doing. Wine shops get their profile too.

What's the revenue model planned for Adegga?

Wine shops pays us to have all their wine prices appear on each wine page with a link to the direct wine page in the shop. Moreover, they can be featured on some pages like the homepage. We will have more special stuff for producers and wine shops in the future.

You also created AVIN, an "ISBN for wine". First of all, congratulations for such a nice idea, I really liked it. Yet... What are the plans you have to turn AVIN widely used, and thus making it useful?

It's very easy to search for books online. You can search by name but also by the ISBN. The same is not true for wines. There's no code to use when you want to search for a wine. Another problem is that each time a wine shop wants to setup a new shop they need to build by hand their own catalog. With the AVIN we want this database to be open so that anyone can use it. We'll publish it under a creative commons license over at www.avin.cc. When this type of data is available and an API is in place all types of creativity can surface. We haven't officially launched the project. So there's not much more that I can say for now.

There's, at the moment, no API to access and munch over Adegga's data... Are you planning to do one in the future?

There's already API working. It's a REST API. The next few weeks we will release it with basic capability to support the launch of our blog / site widgets.

Adegga is at the moment in a closed beta. When do you think the website will be open to everyone?

We decided to do a public beta for 2 reasons. We want to be able to provide a good quality of service and that 's is only possible when all servers are in place and all code is bug free. That's not the case for now. Another things is that we want to grow organically and try to listen to what people using Adegga are asking. We currently have no date to open the registration to everyone.

You decided to do Adegga using PHP... Can you please tell us why that choice?

When the team started Adegga we discussed 3 possibilities. Perl, PHP and Ruby. We had previously worked together in other projects using PHP. That fact together with the fact that PHP5 is a very flexible language and with a powerful community made us decide to use PHP. Moreover, PHP5 supports object oriented programming and works brilliantly with Smarty, out templating system.

Adegga is Copyright (c) 2007 LifeStreet... I know that you left your previous job to create Adegga. Is LifeStreet the company you've founded to have Addega as a product? Do you intend to have more LifeStreet products other then Addega?

Adegga is owned by 3 people and it is in part legally supported by LifeStreet. LifeStreet was founded by me (André Ribeirinho) to support all the projects I'm involved.

Which other public projects are there on LifeStreet?

LifeStreet focus is now on Adegga, nevethless there are 2 other projects that are in the works but still only as proof-of-concepts. No date yet for them to become public.

Do you have any final words to our readers?

Adegga is only starting. There are many things we want to do. We have some very interesting and useful features coming out in the next couple of months. If you love wine join Adegga and enjoy the ride.

Thanks for the interview.

André

[1] - http://adegga.com
[2] - http://tinyurl.com/2bzmgc

Monday

Yet another monday, I think I allways manage to do more or less 52 of these every year. Mondays have something special, but I'm not really into that "monday of hell" that seems to flood many workers around the world. No, mondays have something special, but also tuesdays, wednesdays and every other day in the week.

I guess that the thing that make mondays special is that mondays are usually full of happenings - lot's of non-brain activity, even if that activity involves using brains. Today I had a full monday - a monday in its plenitude, full of happenings, happenings of all kind. I got happy, sad, excited, tired, irated, peacefull, felt fulfilled, but at another time with a powerless feeling, I had good conversations and bad conversations, it was full, and I'm tired.

With all this things - as usually happens with me - I had a day full of stuff I would like to blog about but I'll probably never will. But there was a sentence that I chose to highlight from this day: while talking with Nuno at lunch time, he said to me something that got me surprised: something in the line of "the thing that is missing on Second Life is a text-based client". Thank you Nuno: you might not have made my day, but you surelly gave me more will to keep on some of my personal projects. So today I'll skip the reading I was intending to do and instead I'll hack some more on that messy libsecondlife code. I just wonder... why do you feel that way and yet you're not into Talkers? You know, mine has an open door and you just gave a good reason to make me push you to go there :-)

I'm in a weird mood - ine of those times where I feel like drinking a glass of Oporto's wine while doing brain-activity stuff, staying waked up late until the body can't resist anymore, and then finally fell on the bed, just to wake up in the middle of the following afternoon. I can't: I have no Oporto, and besides it's monday - and tomorrow's another day at work. But it's decided already - one of the first things to buy to my new flat when I finally move on is a good bottle of Oporto's wine.

Stuff I've been doing lately

Well... Since I didn't post for a while, here's a quickie:

Friday I met two nice restaurants and two good wines. With the company, it was joyful. Arrived late at home, so Saturday I only took the train to Coimbra after dinner. On the train I almost prepared the presentation about the Music Industry and DRM for next saturday in Moita - Portugal. I have to cut it off a lot since I have only one hour (Q/A included) and almost 60 slides.

One thing that bothers me a lot is that stupid thing so many people started to innocently claim after Steve Jobs saying it, and one example (the latest I read) can be seen here: the claim that (physical) CD's aren't infected with DRM. Unfortunately, that's untrue.

Yesterday I finally tried to use my cellphone as a modem, via bluetooth. I wasn't really into it since everyone claimed it was a pain in the ass. Well... It wasn't. I just did

sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth start
sudo modemlink

chose, "bluetooth", and activated bluetooth on my cellphone (Motorola E1, for the record). It found the cellphone, and asked if that's what I wanted as my modem. Clicked yes. After that

sudo gprsconnect

It asked what my cellphone operator was, but it is none of those listed. So, I chose "other", clicked "connect"... Et voilá! It couldn't be easier.

One bad thing in the talkers world is that all the talker bases there are aren't being developed anymore. Sometimes some vapourware appears, but the smoke soon dissolves. The exception for that is Mamnuts and PyTalker, unfortunately both maintained by me. Which also means that if I stop working on that... Well, not anymore. A new effort as arised, and I hope it won't be vapourware. Tints purposes a talker standard and a protocol. Around the protocol itself an implementation of it in C will appear, and python bindings for it. Then, a server, a talker (notice the separation, compare with a webserver and a website) and a client. The first client is not going to be a telnet interface, but you can virtually create any kind of client, from an interface to telnet, telnet-ssl, an webite, a XMPP plugin, an interface to Second Life... Well, you name it. The concept is really good, and if it doesn't die, I'm almost surely to be an early adopter.

Finaly... SellABand appears to be down. Anyone knows something about it? Update: Finaly, it replies. 500 Internal Server Error. Update 2: Hmm, seems that it just suffered an update.