Piins Contact API - The data is the users'

We just don't agree that platforms have the right to claim possession over user data in terms of completely restricting them from accessing/deleting/editing all their data in the most efficient way. CAVEAT: "most efficient" does definitely not refer to the way some platforms (we don't want to point with fingers here) define "efficient", i.e. only via their own platform.

They might do a nice job to convince themselves that they are the best, and market valuation might suggest that they are, but all the data there is still the users'. We'd even go that far to say, that not only the direct data, but also all the inferred one is the users', although you can probably argue about that, so we'll cover that in another posting :)

Anyways, as part of our movement to make all data as accessible to their respective users, being extremely aware of privacy and data protection standards, we've released our little contact-import and message sending API.

If you are interested contact us anytime, we're happy to discuss how you can help users to access all their data as easily as possible (well at least, as our little Piin-brains can do, if we piin down the time :). We want to speak to you first to assure, that you are not going to misuse the API in any malicious or harmful way.

The link for the API is for testing only. WE DO NOT STORE ANY OF YOUR CONTACTS, NEITHER DO WE SPAM THEM. We hate spam ourselves and if we had a little bit more time, we'd be working on a giant fight-spam-forever project! This is why we disabled message sending via the Outlook upload as well. You will still be able to see the imported contacts directly after import from your Outlook CSV file, but not be able to send them messages.

P.S.: If your are interested in an internationalization library for PHP, we've developed one for Smarty in PHP. A tutorial for this library can be found here. We're planning to release many more APIs for the open source community and the startup community, so stay tuned with our blog.

Piins - extended Beta

very, very soon (1st of May) Piins is entering an extended Beta version meaning that not only friends and family can see, live and breathe the spirit of Piins.

If you are interested in participating in this extended beta, send us a mail to invitations@piins.com with a funny, exciting or otherwise catchy reason why you should be on it and you'll get an invitation code. If you want, you can also get on our "most famous reasons why I want to be on Piins" list :)

Applications are open until 15th of May 2008.

Hope to see you soon on Piins.

PIINS – AIMS AND PHILOSOPHY BLOG Nr. 1

So people keep asking us – “what’s Piins all about?”. But as with many new concepts when you first start working on them, it’s actually quite hard to sum it up in one pithy sentence. Piins offers such a huge amount of functionality in one clever application that focusing on one specific thing never seems to do it justice.

However, if we were pushed to ‘piin it down’ we’d probably say that Piins simplifies your online life. That’s a bit vague and non-specific we hear you say? Well, the truth is that whatever you want to do on the internet – Piins makes it easier. It’s that simple. And that big.

Piins is a unique combination of social media applications and services accessible via a personalised toolbar anywhere on the internet. In essence Piins turns the web into your own personalised internet (you might call it the ‘Piinternet’).

We think Piins has the potential to be as revolutionary as Google was. Big words…but we really believe this. We are aiming to change forever the way that people access and share online content and store personal data. We also provide people with the tools to completely personalise the online experience, turning every website into a social space that is unique to the user. We promise you it will change the way everyone uses the internet.

Piins' "Hello World"

Over 2 years now have passed since the idea was first born. Unlike most births, it did not hurt very much but it rather was a feeling of complete freedom and happiness. It was a nice, maybe a little idealistic vision of being able to be more than "just not evil", it was a vision of actually "being good".

Over the years we built a nice little prototype, that we're soon going to release to a very special closed group. And no, although it sounds a little odd and 90-ies to be in "stealth-mode", experience from previous ventures just proves that the user is everything you've got in the Internet world. The user is the single most important thing, so you have to give them a chance to help you.

And as much as we think we can enrich the daily life of our users in the Internet, we are convinced that every individual out there enriches and challenges our vision on a daily basis allowing us not only just to "be good" but to even "be better". So stealth-mode is not just another odd marketing gag or a way to make people talk about us (although that could not do any harm), but to allow everyone to participate in that vision without diluting it.

One more thing: we know, that Piins is going to be quite disputed. What we're doing is, as we see it, the next step in Web-Development (yeah, sounds opaque and fuzzy again, but we're happy to discuss with everyone) and it is going to require a possibly yet unmet amount of trust from our users. We're convinced that not only our personalities, everyone in the team, but also our users aim for nothing else than "being good" - naive again? Well, we say it's worth a try!

In that sense, a warm "hello world!" to all you guys'n girls out there from the Piins team - let's go the next step in the Web together.