title
stringlengths 2
283
⌀ | author
stringlengths 4
41
⌀ | year
int64 2.01k
2.02k
| month
int64 1
12
| day
int64 1
31
| content
stringlengths 1
111k
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
MSN and Yahoo to Link IM
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 11 |
There is that Microsoft and Yahoo will announce tomorrow that their instant messaging clients will beome interoperable. The catalyst seems to be the surge in Skype and Google Talk usage. Together MSN and Yahoo account for 44% of total IM usage today (not counting Skype and Google), and reach about 33.5 million monthly unique users. UPDATE: This rumor was confirmed this morning via a . The companies announced that interoperability for their 275 million combined customers will occur around Q2 2006. Hey, how about NOW? :-)
|
Google Targets Del.icio.us
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 11 |
Google has as a feature to search history. It’s not “social” bookmarking, like del.icio.us, because bookmarks are not public and cannot be shared among users. The product also requires way too many steps to create a bookmark. To bookmark a site, make sure your google search history is turned on. Click “search history” on the top right of the results page. Bookmark a site by clicking on the star next to a result, and fill out the metadata. There are some nice ajax features, including auto-fill for tags. Tags are space delineated and I noticed that the “,” key doesn’t work at all in the field – reducing tagging errors common to other applications. To see tagged sites, click on the bookmarks link on the left sidebar. Bookmarks also appear on your personalized Google homepage. Bookmarks are not public yet. If/once they are, this may be the first serious competition to del.icio.us (note that has had ). Perhaps the portals should just acknowledge del.icio.us’ commanding network effect and (try to) acquire them?
|
Blogniscient v. Memeorandum
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 29 |
Ben Ruedlinger’s relaunched with a completely new look and feel. An old screenshot of the service is . Blogniscient is a blog news organizer that, like , uses a propreitary algorithm for determining what’s hot in the blogosphere at any given time. Unlike , which creates news items based on user bookmarking and subsequent voting to determine front page items, Blogniscient and Memeorandum are automated. Another similarity: both have hard to remember, and difficult to spell, domain names. :-) Memeorandum has two verticals currently: and . Blogniscient has five: politics, tech, sports, entertainment and business. Blogniscient also has an “all category”, and additional tabs for “top blogs” and “freshest stuff”. Memeorandum does not rank blogs publicly. They include new content on the top right area of the site, and additional new content on the bottom left. Memeorandum also includes older content that has fallen from the main area, on the bottom right of the site. Blogniscient just posts a link and summary of top articles. Memorandum goes two steps further – showing blogs that contribute to the discussion, as well as a permalink for the entire discussion group. For instance, Blogniscient’s new launch is the top story on Memeorandum right now, which you can see by , even after it’s fallen off as stale news. Memeorandum appears more transparent in their ranking because you can actually see and link to blogs which have contributed to the discussion. Memeorandum also can show news items from major publications like the New York Times, and press releases, as the main news items. Linking blogs are shown in the discussion area. I also find this to be a very useful feature. Taking everything into consideration, I still believe that Memeorandum is a better service. I’ll use Blogniscient too, but Memeorandum has – I spend more time on Memeorandum than any other website.
|
Wow! Del.icio.us rolls out more stuff
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 29 |
In addition to the robust and open by Del.icio.us earlier this week, there are at least two additional new features that are worth noting. I also have a few more thought on the search function below. Del.icio.us has . If you find a link to a MP3 file, a small icon appears to the left of the bookmark that can be clicked to play the file. . are, effectively, tags of tags. This feature existed before, but it is now much easier to create and edit tag bundles with a simple click of tags. I’ve been using the del.icio.us search function a lot over the last few days. For certain searches, del.icio.us has far more relevant results than any other real time engine. The data isn’t necessarily deep, but the top result is super relevant. More on this (possibly) later, but del.icio.us may have just very quietly created the best (real time) search engine on the web. One last thing. Someone pointed out to me recently that is now redirecting to del.icio.us. The domain is registered under Joshua’s name. I think it’s a great move to obtain the domain, and I wouldn’t mind a re-brand with the new URL.
|
Inform.com Doesn't
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 16 |
launched today with a splashy article. has some kind words. isn’t so kind – he says “It fails miserably.” I agree. I honestly can’t figure out what it is, even after reading the Times fluff piece. They say its an RSS Reader but adding feeds is anything but easy. Newbies need . Oldbies want something that handles a ton of feeds . This does neither. And if I simply want to know what’s hot in the blogophere, I use , which , is ugly as hell but it actually . As an example, track this story on Memeorandum . What it does do well is break. Early and often. They warned me that it was optimized for IE, but I’m a firefox guy and I charged ahead. Bad idea. Also, URLs are hidden. The UI is unworkable – even my scroll wheel on my mouse is disabled on the site. I try to find the good in new products, but I’m failing on this one. Please, tell me what I’m missing.
|
My Thoughts on Reading Lists
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 16 |
Dave Winer has been thinking about, and recently about, a new idea: Reading Lists. is a really useful file structure that just about everyone who uses a feed aggregator, like bloglines, is already using without necessarily knowing it. Most readers keep subscribed feeds for a user in OPML format, for easy importing and exporting. If you your OPML feed you get a XML file of your feeds, which other feed readers understand. The problem with opml files from readers is that they are static, meaning I can give you my OPML file but you will never know if I add or delete feeds unless I tell you and give you the new file. All you get is a snapshot of my feeds from the moment that I share my file with you. Dave thinks these files should be dynamic, which means that I can share my opml file, or as he calls it my , and anyone who subscribes to it will always have the current version, no matter how often I amend that list. There is very little technology needed to allow this to happen – the various feed readers simply need to agree to support dynamic lists and allow people to share them permanently. Dave’s trying to make this happen. If he succeeds, we’ll all be able to subscribe to reading lists from people we trust on a given subject, and good feeds will be that much easier to find. Fred Oliveira about this recently as well. In a comment, writes: i could easily see this not only as a way to share my reading list with others i know, but also to be matched with others i don’t know with common interests. what if the system could match me with other people who have similar tech, music or lifestyle feeds as i do. it would be a fantastic way to make new connections as well as strengthen existing ones, and i could see communities forming around overlapping feeds. these communities might be stronger than those that form around a single website because they’d have more in common. Yeah, exactly. As soon as people start to think about this idea, a lot of other interesting ideas start to spring up. A real world example of where we need this is our . Feeds for each blog are linked, and we have a static OPML file that we are updating as new feeds join. However, because the file is static, anyone who downloads the file has to check back frequently as new feeds are added. Let’s automate this process.
|
PreviewSeek – New Web Search Engine
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 16 |
PreviewSeek is a new London-based search engine created by Chris Hong that is very quietly impressing people with a number of innovating features. Basic search results are great but nothing to get overly excited about. The useful features include disambiguation of queries (are you searching for “apple” the fruit, or “apple” the computer”?), preview of search pages (think Browster), and better refining of searches. PreviewSeek does a good job at attempting to determine meaning from a query. Type in “ ” and you get a result set with a numer of options for the query, including the island, the programming language, and even the coffee. This is my favorite feature. PreviewSeek allows you to preview search results in much the same way as (our ), except without the download and the ads. It’s a great way quickly scan results without actually clicking away from previewseek. For any given query PreviewSeek will suggest a number of refinement options on the left sidebar, which greatly assist in drilling down on a particular search.
|
Shadows 1.0
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 28 |
I had an early peak at while it was still in beta, . Shadows is a product. Last week, Pluck took the beta tag off of Shadows and . Dave Panos, Pluck’s CEO, gave me a walk through of the new functionality last night. Shadows is a social bookmarking site with good features, and all of the expected bells and whistles. But the reason I like it so much is that they’ve come up with a really interesting application for all the bookmark data they collect – shadow pages. If you choose to install their toolbar, you can click on “Shadow Page” from any web page and be redirected to that page’s Shadow Page. This page is a collection of metadata gathered from user bookmarks. For instance, here is the for Apple’s . The Shadow Page includes notes from users who have bookmarked the iPod Nano web page, a tag cloud of tags used to describe the page, users who’ve tagged it, etc. A user can choose to make any bookmark private, but any public bookmarks are included on the Shadow Page. It’s a really unique product and a good twist on social bookmarking. Shadows also has set up groups, like for Web 2.0. Links are automatically collected here by users who tag pages with “web2.0”. There is also a tab for a general discussion that any user can participate in. The fact that all of this metadata for websites is being collected is not that interesting. What is that anyone can access this site metadata (and only that site’s metadata) by simply clicking a button in a toolbar. Shadows has been slowly building up a loyal user base, many of which are interested in highly niche content. An example is this Shadow Page on . An entire community has emerged around this page, with users writing their own Harry Potter fiction, thousands of discussion items, etc. As more groups are formed (and users will soon have the ability to create a group on the fly, based on how they tag a page), more of these microcommunities will sprout, generating lots of page views for Shadows.
|
My New Blog
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 28 |
I’ve launched a new companion blog to TechCrunch called . I wrote a longish describing exactly why it exists (and why TechCrunch exists), but here’s the essence: The main reason is that I find that sometimes, I want to talk about more than just new companies and products. Sometimes I have something to say about what’s going on in the blogosphere or the world. Sometimes I want to link to something interesting another blogger has written, but which has nothing to do with new companies. I found that doing that on TechCrunch tends to dilute the core value of that blog. Yeah, I just quoted myself. Sorry. It won’t happen again. If you are interested in reading CrunchNotes, here’s the feed: . Thanks to , who designed CrunchNotes (and TechCrunch).
|
Goowy Charges Ahead
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 17 |
Alex Bard’s flash-based desktop replacement , based in San Diego, has impressed me from the start. We originally profiled Goowy on and again a ago. Today Goowy released further functionality. First, they . While that storage is only for use with email now, they will soon be releasing a virtual file storage product, allowing users to really put that 2 GB to work. Second, Goowy released a that allows you to access core Goowy features without going to the site. Email notifications, RSS updates, calendar items, etc. are included. The look and feel is very much like , but we’ve noticed no performance issues on our machine as we did with that service. If flash is your thing (and maybe even it if isn’t), Goowy is for you. Let us know what you think of it.
|
The Web 2.0 WorkGroup
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 10 |
There are a number of weblogs that I read religiously – of the 400+ feeds that I read, there are 15 or so that I check multiple times a day for new content. Two of those blogs are Richard MacManus’ and Fred Oliveira’s . Richard and Fred write blogs that are very complimentary to TechCrunch. While we generally focus on new companies, Richard analyzes trends in the new web and Fred focuses on design, usability and development. To get an overall view of the space, I highly recommend reading all three blogs. Today we’ve formed a loose alliance. You’ll see a “web 2.0 workgroup” logo on the left sidebar of this page – it links to a landing page – . On that page we have links to all three blogs, along with recent posts and our feed information. We will be adding additional blogs over time. This is not a blog network or anything formal. We just like the idea of coordinating our ideas a little more closely. Richard and Fred have also become good friends. Richard, who’s from New Zealand, has come to the U.S. for the first time to attend the Web 2.0 conference last week, and he’s been staying at my house while he’s here. Fred, who’s from Portugal, is also staying here while he works on our project.
|
HealthLine – Reliable Medical Information
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 17 |
, a very smart medical search engine with web 2.0 features, launched this evening. Tony Gentile, HealthLine’s VP Product Management, . First, its a good search engine. Normal language is translated into medical terms, and refinement options are shown for related information. For instance, a search for breast cancer shows refinement options for “treatment” and “symptoms”, as well as links to the broader search of “cancer”. The HealthMaps feature is incredibly useful. It is a visual display of information relevant to your query. Do a search for “ ” and click on the top left link just above the first result to see this. Clicking on any of the visual cues will give additional refined information. You can also see the HealthMap feature in the screen shot above. Refinements, along with HealthMaps, is a very good way to find relevant information with a single search on a term even loosely related to the information you are looking for. Healthline also offers browsing by channel, with topics ranging from Acne to Yeast Infections. If you become a member, you can create news alerts, and tag and save search results. You can also write reviews of articles and rate . This is an excellent resource.
|
Flock's Refines Features, Expands Beta
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 17 |
‘s CEO Bart Decrem expanded the beta over the weekend to 1,007 people, most of whom are now about it. The product, which was good , is even better today. I’m a big supporter of Flock. I am even writing this post while wearing a Flock tshirt. Flock is definitely the Flickr of browsers. :-) The three most powerful tools Flock offers it’s users are bookmarks, blogging and a RSS reader. They’ve dropped their propreitary bookmarking engine and have replaced it with del.icio.us. I have a ton of del.icio.us bookmarks – thousands – and it took a while for the browser to chug through them all during the import procedure. But it did, and I now have one hell of an interface into my favorite bookmarking service. Since Flock supports tabbed browsing, I can keep bookmarks open in a separate tab and refer back whenever. Partnering with Del.icio.us is brilliant. I do not know if they have plans to integrate with other social bookmarking sites, but I imagine it would be fairly simple for them to do. The blogging tool was, and remains, absolutely the best I’ve seen. This tool brings flickr pictures directly into the blog tool, allowing simple drag and drop into the post. It’s dual-pane, with both wysiwyg and html interfaces (I actually preferred the old toggle method of changing from html to wysiwyg, but I’m not complaining). Setup is very simple. It just works. Flock also has a built in RSS reader that is both dead simple to use and yet powerful enough for heavy users. A simple drop down box can be accessed for any page that allows you to grab the feed for the page you are currently on, and add it to an existing or newly created folder. Feeds can be tagged, and the viewer allows for expanded or collapsed feed viewing. There are some speed issues with this version, 0.5, but in my opinion it has more than enough features to convince web users by the millions to switch from their default browser and go with Flock. Let’s launch this thing!
|
Web 2.0 This Week (October 9-15)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 17 |
Tons of new companies launched this week. My guess is they were aiming for the Web 2.0 Conference last week but had to delay. This may have worked out for the best as the covereage they received was probably much better after the press chaos last week. Most bloggers have probably noticed that is back in the bay area. It’s good to have his brain around here again. I’ve been invited to a couple of his with Steve Gillmor. I try to keep my mouth shut and keep my listen to talk ratio as high as possible. These guys aren’t always right, but they’ve seen and done enough that even when they’re wrong, you can learn a lot by being around them. We said goodby to , who stayed with us for during his trip to silicon valley. Based on how warmly he was received, my expectation is that Richard will be back soon. His eloquent was excellent. We launched something called the last week. It’s an experimental sandbox that a bunch of bloggers focused on writing about the new web are working on. Right now its a directory of participating blogs. Soon it will be much more. Here’s this week’s wrapup: (update), , (update), , , , (update), (update), , (update), , (update), , , Give the blogosphere an of your new product and let the . Launch a that breaks Firefox, ignore blogger input and give the New York Times an . . that there are over 100 million blogs. Breakdown by country. Awesome. The BBC also that the web has grown more this year than ever before. is on Nerd TV. It’s a big download but worth it. I’m glad stuff like this is being recorded for historical purposes. , and it’s important. He’s continuing his theme of comparing search results on the existing blog search engines. let’s talk about what the state of time-based search is. In a phrase: it sucks. No one is doing it well. I can just hear everyone saying “huh? I thought Feedster, Technorati, IceRocket, Bloglines, and Pubsub, among others, are doing time-based search?†Yes, but they all are unsatisfactory. Why? Well, for one, they’ll never have the traffic of MSN Search, Yahoo, or Google. Most of the “normal†people around me never will use a search engine other than these three. Heck, most of the people in the world have never even clicked on “advanced search†and you’re gonna try to get them to visit something like http://blogsearch.google.com ? Yeah, right. Everyone said search was “good enough” before Google. Blog search isn’t even “good enough”. takes the time to list large-file sharing apps. Bookmark it. Oodle got it right when they went for the decentralized content approach. Craigslist felt threatened and turned them off. Oodle diplomatically. This is not great for Oodle, but I also think it’s not great for Craigslist. Data must be open. Sites that try to horde it will lose in the end. Fred Oliveira , with a focus on people tag. I hope he’ll still be in the bay area for on October 28 to share his ideas with that group. A launched a on splogging and the fact that BlogSpot seems to be the main source of it. Google owns BlogSpot and has a clear incentive to allow this to happen – they serve ads on every one of these splogs. This is not a new problem. Google needs to take action. . Yesterday he . These two guys need to work together to make the blogosphere and the web a better place to hang out. I hope they find a way.
|
Yahoo Blog Search Launched
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 10 |
Yahoo a tonight at 7 pm. had the scoop. Unlike their podcasting product, , the blog search product is not much more than a quick add-on to Yahoo News. Frankly, I am more than disappointed. Instead of launching a stand alone property, Yahoo has integrated blog search into Yahoo News. Blog search results are presented on the right side of normal results, in a side-bar type area. For an example, see . I’ve inserted a big red arrow and blew up the image to more than twice the size we normally use so that you can actually see the results in the right area of the page. Yahoo has also integrated Flickr and My Web 2.0 results. It’s unclear how relevant the results are but at first glance there is significant room for improvement. I am finding the UI completely unusable.
|
Gada.be – Tag Meta Search Done Right
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 10 |
has launched today – a powerful tag meta-search engine that has an incredibly simple and thoughtful design. Shayne Sweeney is the developer who’s building . Gada takes a query and runs it against sites like Google News, Technorati, Flickr, IceRocket, Amazon, Wikipedia, 43Things, etc. Searches can be narrowed via a drop down box to “photos”, “social” etc. for more specific results. The search itself, and any narrowing, are also accompished via the domain name. For instance, a photo search for “web2con”, the tag people are using for last week’s web2.0 conference, is also accomplished by the URL . The query is the subdomain, and the photo filter is the /p at the end. Allowing easy searches filtering via the domain name structure is brilliant, and allows for very powerful mobile searches. Note also that the name “Gada” is extremely easy to type on a phone’s number pad. It was borne out of several frustrations. If you’ve ever tried to visit a Web site over a mobile device, you know it’s a pain in the knuckle. The domain had to be simple to key-in from anywhere. gada.be is 4232.2233 on most cell phones and PSPs. Normally, when you want to find something online, you have to choose a Web site (wait for the page to load) enter the query (wait for the second page to load) then see results from that provider. With “gada.be,” you insert the query *AS* the subdomain! Then, there’s having to visit several sites just to get the results you want. Often, this isn’t feasible when you’re on-the-go. Even when you’re sitting with a laptop or chained to a desktop, it’s still a time-consuming process. We all love the individual search services, so why not bring ’em together? Okay, that’s what we did. Moreover, we dynamically output OPML which you can turn around and import into your favorite news aggregator. gada.be saves everybody time! It’s likely that Gada will become a much-linked to site for definitive results on a term, in a similar way as wikipedia is today. Gada incorporates all relevant information in a permanent URL, and so becomes a comprehensive result set for a tag link. Gada also outputs search results in RSS and OPML, allowing users to easily subscribe to and organize searches. More on Gada on their .
|
Google Reader – Was I Too Quick to Criticize?
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 10 |
over the weekend and gave what I felt was a factually correct review of the product. However, some of the comments I’ve received to the post, along with a couple of emails, suggested some of my criticisms were off the mark. I took another look today and I must say that I was dead wrong on a few points. I’ve copied my “areas to improve on” below and have bolded text that was incorrect: As I mentioned above, Google Reader is targeting heavy RSS readers. The product isn’t useful, however, for moving through a large number of feeds efficiently. Posts are listed in order of “relevance†(which doesn’t seem to actually sort things in any relevant way), or by date. The reader is slow. Paging down through posts results in a long and unacceptable delay. As a side note, importing my OPML list took about 10 minutes. Since this was a one-time cost, it’s not that big of a deal. Since this is a web-based reader only, there is no syncronization. Google uses ajax instead of frames. While frames is an old technology, readers using it allow for multiple scroll bars – this means you can keep the feed frames locked while scrolling through individual posts. This needs to be addressed. Google Reader is optimized for Firefox. It isn’t working properly on other browsers yet. The three innacuracies were: A quick look at the “My Subscriptions” link that is prominently displayed at the top of the reader shows that all of this functionality is included, and actually works quite well. Under this tab, feeds are shown, can be sorted (second circle below), can be deleted, and, perhaps most importantly, can be searched (third circle) using the “filter” feature. Clicking on any particular feed brings up the related posts in the bottom window. It’s actually a very nice intuitive UI. Google Reader is still painfully slow, but these features, which I previously missed, do much to make it a competitive product. In my opinion, the “my subscriptions” tab should optionally be the home page, reducing the necessary clicks to get there.
|
Hotmail expanding Kahuna Beta
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 10 |
Microsoft’s new ajax Hotmail client, called Kahuna, is its beta group today, to approximatley 200,000 users. the beta was extremely difficult to get into, frustrating some hotmail users. We’ve been beta testing Kahuna for a few weeks. It is a big improvement on the old Hotmail interface, using ajax to provide a much more Outlook-like email experience. Features include a three-pane view and drag and drop functionality to folders, etc. We previously wrote about Kahuna on and .
|
Update: TechCrunch Party This Friday
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 19 |
We are proud to annouce the sponsors of the this weekend. , , , , , , , , , . If you plan on attending, . Demos start at 6 pm sharp. We are going to reduce the demo time to 15 minutes to get more companies in. At 7 pm we’ll take a 15-20 minute break for toasts and a . I’m pretty fired up about these demos. Some of the companies, like (and to some extent ), will be showing their stuff in public for the first time ever.
|
Web 2.0 This Week (October 2 – 8)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 10 |
What a week! Web 2.0 was absolutely terrific. There were hundreds of smart and interesting people milling about and cross pollinating their ideas. Our focus was on the new companies, of course, and we briefly wrote about each and every one of them in our two part post “The Companies of Web 2.0”. See and . Here’s this week’s wrapup: , , , (update), (update), , , , , , I had the chance to meet Fred Wilson at the Web 2.0 conference – I only wish I was able to pick his brain for a longer time. He on “point” v. “end-to-end” solutions. A point solution is a stand alone web service – think Flickr before its acquisition by Yahoo. An end-to-end solution is a group of services under one roof – think portals like MSN, Yahoo, etc. Generally, mass users like portal type solutions, but point solution are almost always better. Investors and entrepreneurs need to think about this, of course, when deciding on their eventual exit strategy. Must they aim to be bought by portals? If you are near Palo Alto, a must-attend event is on October 28-29, 2005. Will you be there? Speaking of tagging, links to a on the subject that is worth the read. analyzes the and comes up with some very interesting thoughts on the value of blogs. and take the analysis even further. Bottom Line: Inbound links are worth $564.54 each. I’d like to see the analysis done from a different angle – how much is an RSS reader worth? See # 6 below. writes a great post listing all of the various visualization tools for del.icio.us data. Hey Brian, per my #4 above, you owe me $564.54. :-) Bloglines on their blog. While there are lots and lots of blogs, Bloglines says a blog is important if it has at least one subscriber – a fair measurement if you consider Bloglines’ market position (still dominant) and if you discount the fact that just about everyone subscribes to their own feed. By this measure, there are about 1.3 million “important” blogs. Four months ago there were 1.1 million such blogs. This makes up the “long tail”. Things drop off quickly from there. Only about 37,000 blogs have 20 or more readers, and only 437 have at least 1,000 readers. The scientific term they use for the big guys? “Totally Sweet”. :-) Thank you, CNet, for to include in your list of the . I’m not sure we belong, but it makes us feel great!
|
Top Five Web 2.0 Venture Capitalists
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 19 |
Most venture capitalists don’t understand tagging, blogs, rss, ajax, or the two way web. They scoff at social bookmarking sites and think podcasting is a fad (maybe it is). They desparately “want in” to this renaissance of the web, but can’t be bothered to open up the simplest RSS reader and understand the power of decentralized content. In short, they don’t get it. Most traditional VC funds have a single web-focused partner, who may or may not be interested in web 2.0 consumer companies. For the most part, these VCs are not part of the most interesting deals. If they do get what you are pitching, they want to pump way more money into the company than makes sense. Here’s my attempt to point out the venture capitalists . Some of these have new funds and only recently became venture capitalists. Some of them have been around forever. There are just two personality traits all share. First, they understand that a fundamental shift has occured in web evolution. Second, they are hungry as hell to find deals, and spend more time proactively looking for the next opportunity than they do sitting back and looking at the business plan stream that naturally flows into any venture fund. This list is purely subjective. It’s blatantly biased. Some VCs don’t belong and many who do are left off. But it’s a list, nonetheless, that I’ve come up with over the last few weeks of interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and journalists. is a partner at and writes a blog called . He’s on this list partially because he incubated the hottest and most anticipated company on the web right now, Flock. This guy picks winners. Of 43 early stage investments, 19 have gone public and 16 have been acquired. It could be because of his education – he has the killer combination of a math/CS degree and a MBA from Harvard. invested in Skype. Done. He also sits on the board of SocialText, and his fund was in Baidu. Tim will go anywhere in the world for the right deal. Most VC’s with 1/10th his net worth won’t leave silicon valley for a board meeting. is is a General Partner at August Capital and writes a that has over 10,000 RSS readers. David best asset is that he knows . He’s the kind of guy you want to drink beers with while watching a football game. If you are his friend, he’ll happily introduce you to anyone, and often puts two people together just because he thinks they should know each other. He’s invested in companies that are defining the web today: SixApart and Technorati among them. And even if he doesn’t invest, he’ll do more than most VCs who have invested to help you. Here’s just one example – take a look at the things , which isn’t a portfolio company. David has told me on numerous occasions that “the web is an ecosystem” and that he wants to play his part in making it healthy. He certainly does. Josh Kopelman, through , is quietly filtering through just about every young web 2.0 company, and investing in many of them. Josh has a Wharton MBA and was the founder of Half.com, which was sold to ebay in 1998. His investments include Feedster, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us and, reportedly, Browster (and others). Josh understand web 2.0 better than most entrepreneurs. His experience as an entrepreneur and growing huge businesses out of whole cloth is an incredible asset. Fred Wilson is a founding partner of and writes the extremely popular . If you are new to web 2.0, start with his post. Then read the rest of his blog (even the stuff about music). Fred was the original lead investor in del.icio.us, back when people were still scratching their heads about it. That enough gets him on the list. But Union Square’s , including indeed, could also be major home runs. It’s clear from his blog and what people say about him that he spends a lot of time working with his portfolio companies. He’s the kind of guy you want on your side when you go into battle. – is a former VC and still makes the odd angel investment (Feedster, Truveo, and a few others). His allows him to work with pre-funding companies and get them ready for prime time. In the last year, he’s worked with Userplane, Buzznet, UltraDNS, Glenbrook Networks, Loomia and two other undisclosed companies. If you have a hot idea and need advice, funding, introductions and anything else, Jeff may just take you on as a client and do what it takes to help you be successful – but like a VC, he’ll have to be convinced of your potential.
– Brad is a managing director at and writes a must-read web 2.0 blog called Feld Thoughts. Read his if you are in the process of raising capital. I keep trying to meet him but haven’t yet. Brad’s investments include invested in NewsGator, Feedburner and Technorati. – This is the only non-person on here. just closed a $50 million fund to invest in young companies. Given the incredible access Tim O’Reilly has to these companies, OATV could quickly become an important fund in the web 2.0 space. – founded ebay and is the Co-founder of , where he’s invested in a number of interesting companies including EVDB, SocialText and Feedster, plus a few undiscloseds. And it’s always good to have a multi-billionaire on your side. – Peter is a founding partner of , a $100 million fund. Peter also writes , another must-read blog. His investments include ojos, an incredible new photo-metadata service that is going to be extremely disruptive (and useful). Like others in this post, he’s a guy I’d want on my board. He’s gone through many battles as an entrepreneur in his time (he founded his first company in the early 80’s and worked at Infoseek in the late 90’s).
– Peter, the former CEO of paypal, has invested in LinkedIn, Friendster, LinkedIn and other web 2.0 companies. He’s just created the . Can’t wait to see what investments come out of it. There are three additional VCs that are yet to make notable investments. But they are laser focused on the space and are hungry to make investments in web 2.0 companies. You will find them at every event and seem determined to make a name for themselves. I include them here now because Ithere’s a good chance that when I update this list in a year, they’ll be at the top. – is a Venture Partner at Austin Ventures, a fund with $3 billion under management. He’s their consumer and web 2.0 guy and seems to be spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley and at web 2.0 events. Prior to joining AV, Tom was an entrepreneur who founded a couple of successful Internet companies. This adds a unique perspective to his investing philosophy in web 2.0. He works actively with a number of AV portfolio companies including Pluck and, I suspect, will be making important investments in web 2.0 in the near future. – is a principal at Venrock Associates and has recently started a great blog called (where he wrote a much bookmarked post on ). Prior to Venrock, Dan was at Garage.com. You’ll also find Dan at most web 2.0 conferences, and he’s made a huge effort to reach out to the community and network. – is a principal at Shasta Ventures, a young $200 million fund that has a deep commitment to and expertise in consumer-focused businesses. Jason was at Walmart.com and was part of a small group of executives that ran the place before coming to Shasta – he was VP of Strategy, Operations and Business Development. He has a keen insight into web 2.0 and has served as an advisor to a number of companies in the space. Jason knows how to grow startups to massive scale, and he is always thinking about which new companies he can help to achieve that scale.
|
First Screen Shots of Riya
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 26 |
(formerly ) will be opening its doors to 10 or so lucky alpha testers tomorrow morning. Riya leverages potent facial and text recognition technology with an intelligent interface to help people make sense of the thousands of untitled and untagged photos that are building up on their hard drives (and on the web). We previously profiled Riya (then Ojos) on I went by Riya’s offices today and met with the to get a look at their product. According to , Riya’s CEO, I am the first outsider to get a chance to bang on the live product. Given how hot Riya is right now, I consider that a huge honor. The process starts with registration and choosing a privacy setting on your pictures. You then download a client application that uploads photos you choose to include in Riya. The actual uploading takes a while – about 4 hours for each GB of photos. Instead of waiting around, Riya will email you when the process is complete. That’s when the fun starts. In my case about 400 pictures were uploaded. I was presented with a view of facial thumbnails of everyone in my photos. Riya asks that you begin to educate it by telling it who the people are…it then very quickly starts to auto-tag pictures with a surprising level of accuracy. Riya also recognizes text in photos, and lets you select any area of a photo and tag that as well. For instance, you could select just the Eiffel Tower in a photo and tag it as such. Within moments, everything of importance in all of my photos was tagged. And more importantly, . It’s an easy step to allow friends to also tag and search your photos (if you choose), and even allow full public search. Linking these two features – massively automated tagging of everything in photos, with search, is compelling to say the least. The folks at Riya call it “tag locally, search globally”. Riya is going to be successful. They have real technology. And, as people use it to tag photos, Riya will create a database of unique attributes of people. Once enough people start using the service, Riya will be able to auto-tag people’s names with less and less training by the user. At that point, why would anyone try a competing service? Riya will have technology (protected by patents) and an incredible network effect as well. Riya plans on having a destination site that will be free, and will OEM their service to other photo services. Sites like flickr can certainly try to duplicate Riya’s service, but unless they move very quickly Riya’s network effect Riya will be insurmountable. In fact, Riya could become so ubiquitous as to actually cause real privacy concerns. One question I asked the team today was – “what if you get so much data on people that I could take a picture of a crowd, upload it to Riya, and instantly have the names of every single person in the crowd?” Apparently, their technology is not that powerful – yet. Riya’s ability to know who’s in a photo is largely based on who you are and the people you are connected to. To fully appreciate Riya you have to see it visually. I’ve posted a few screen shots below of my experience using it earlier today.
. It’s going to be a popular service.
|
Psst…Want in to the Wink Beta?
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 26 |
is a very interesting new search site that combines traditional search results with del.icio.us and other user generated metadata. We profiled Wink on and Michael Tanne, the CEO, gave a demo at our . Wink was also one of the of our party. Wink is in private beta right now and are dripping in new users a few at a time to test the service. Thousands of people have been waiting weeks to get in. As part of their sponsorship of our party, This process is automated – if you don’t receive an immediate invitation you either misspelled “techcruncher” or 100 people have already requested an invite with the code. If you aren’t one of the first 100, they will still make an effort to get you to the top of the list. Michael has requested that I stress that beta testers should be willing to spend some time helping them build out the service. You can do that by tagging results, syncing with your del.icio.us tags, creating search sets and, generally, performing a lot of searches.
|
Voice Email with WaxMail
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 26 |
is a free voice email service for Outlook from the guys who created (see ). WaxMail requires a small download and a quick installation with Outlook. From there, all you have to do is click a button to record a voicemail. The sound file is saved as an MP3 and is attached to the email, which can also include text and other attachments. WaxMail is free, although there is a small text advertisement added to the email. For those wishing to exclude the add, WaxMail charges a $29.95 one time fee. We’ve profiled a few companies in this space – , , and . They all do things a little differently…and for many people will work best. The downside is that it only currently works with Outlook, and I really dislike Outlook. The upside: it’s free, it works incredibly well and it has a very slick interface. Also, I love the fact that files are actually sent as attachments (meaning they can be listened to offline, easily forwarded, etc.) instead of forcing the listener to click on a link. Check out for additional information. Try it out and send me a voice message at [email protected] just discovered WaxMail as well and has some ideas on using it for podcasting.
|
Dave Winer To Give the Flickr of Keynotes tonight
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 21 |
Everything is all set for tonight’s party and we’ve very quietly re-opened to attendees. It also looks like we’ll have 50+ people via festoon. We will be having demos from 6 pm to about 10:30, starting with the first public look at At 7, we’ll take a break and have sponsor speeches and a keynote by Dave Winer. His .
|
OPML Experiment – Version 2.0
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 7 |
Our with (listen to Dave’s podcast too) has of a bunch of people, and new applications to leverage directories of blogs are being created by some really smart people. Here’s what we have so far: As soon as I can find the time I am going to implement Matt’s wordpress plugin to output our posts automatically, and with Kosso’s permission put his his widget out our site to replace our basic category system on the right sidebar. OPML is awesome.
|
Memeorandum Hype and New Feature
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 21 |
continues to be , and it is starting to get real traction outside of the core blogosphere as well. posted an in depth review of Gabe Rivera’s Memeorandum this morning. Gabe Rivera, the 32-year-old programmer who quit his job at Intel to found the site, says he built Memeorandum thinking of the “live web as an editor.” “If you read blogs, you know that there is this conversation and that some articles are the talk of the day, and other posts have important things to say about those,” Rivera said. “If you built graphs in your mind of what the talk looks like, I think it looks like what I’ve done. I get the sense (Memeorandum) is just a natural representation of what is already going on.” Rivera hopes the site will appeal to more than just the überconnected, and could be useful as an entry point for those unfamiliar with blogs. To that end, the site’s design, which features large headlines and stories in declining order of importance, mimics that of an online newspaper. “The best way for someone to get into (the) blogs thing is to find a blog that is tracking an issue important to you, because someone new to it can understand the headline and then go read the blog. I think my site works pretty well that way,” Rivera said. “My dad started using my site … a couple weeks later he spotted something he was interested in and now he knows all these bloggers.” Congrats Gabe on the Wired article and the mainstread traffic it will send to Memeorandum. As I’ve said, Memeorandum is exceptional, and it is changing the web. a new feature – a great widget that bloggers and webmasters can include on their site showing the most recent tech.memeorandum headlines. We’ve included the widget on TechCrunch, in the left sidebar. It’s another great way to stay on top of the news! Check out the blogging conversations on the topic at .
|
edgeio launching soon
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 7 |
is a company that , , Matt Kaufman, and I have been working on for most of this year. It willl be launching in the near future. If you’d like to be notified of the launch, . If you have a weblog and you’d like to be part of early testing, there is a field for giving us your blog address as well. Edgeio will also have its own blog soon with more details.
|
Tag Camp Photo Album with Picaboo
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 31 |
I first heard about from a few days ago. Picaboo is a way to create, share and print photo albums. Picaboo was founded in September 2002 by Howard Field and Kevin McCurdy, and is funded by Kleiner Perkins and Softbank. They launched in May 2005. It only works on Windows right now (although Mac user have built in software for this stuff that works very well already). Picaboo requires a client download and the album editing occurs on this client. While I’d prefer a web app (flash or ajax), having a desktop client does speed things up considerably. Picaboo is free to download, and creating and sharing albums is also free. They generate revenue from the sale of printed albums and dvds. A printed photo album is $25 plus shipping and includes up to 20 pages. Each additional page is $2. I spent a considerable amount of time this evening test the software, creating an album and sharing it with to test out the features. The user interface is extremely easy to use and required little or no help or FAQ reference.You simply upload pictures, choose a format for the album, add text, etc. There are a wide variety of album choices. You can also add music, or any other sound file (commentary, for instance). One thing I didn’t like is that the pictures must be locally stored before uploading. You cannot, for instance, give it a flickr username and use those pictures. Once you’ve created an album, you can share it with “pals”, who can, if they’ve downloaded the picaboo software, view the album and add to it, creating their own version. You can also publish an album to the web for viewing by anyone. For some reason, the web version of albums will not play any music or other sound file you’ve assocated with it (a serious flaw in my opinion). I used photos from last weekend’s tagcamp event to create an album, . You can’t hear it on the web version, but the is, in my opinion, perfect. Let me know what you think.
|
Yahoo Launches Major Podcasting Service
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 9 |
Yahoo just a comprehensive podcasting search, directory and listening service called (URL will be working in the next couple of hours). nailed this story and has posted an exclusive podcast with , Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer. John has also posted the transcript of the interview below the podast link. Geoff has some interesting things to say: We want this to be as open as possible on both ends. We want to work with every device – however a user of Yahoo podcasts wants to consume their podcast, wherever they want to do it, whatever device, and on whatever jukebox. We’re going to work with them (jukeboxes) and we’re going to work with as many standards as possible using standard pcast format to integrate with a jukebox. You can listen to podcasts right on your computer, or you can listen to it right on the web itself. On the other end, we want to be as comprehensive as possible. If you have a podcast we’re going to find you, and if we haven’t found you then you can come to our website and give us your RSS feed and we’ll get it into our index within 24 hours. I spoke to John to get more information. He says that Yahoo will be issuing a press release shortly. It’s very interesting and very cool that Yahoo did an exclusive podcast to issuing a press release. Right on! :
|
The Open Source RSS Reader
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 31 |
I’ve been using for a few weeks now. It’s the first time I’ve seriousy used a desktop application to read feeds – I really like web based readers because there is no software download, compatibility issues, etc., and because many of the desktop readers are not free. But so many Blogbridge fans have emailed me suggesting I try it out that I did. And based on what I’ve seen, I give it a thumbs up. Blogbridge is also open source. The founder, Pito Salas, tells me that there are at least six non-employee developers contributing to the project. There is a business model – Blogbridge eventually hopes to roll out premium features on top of the open source code base. For now, everything is free. Blogbridge comes in three flavors – Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. It is written entirely in Java. There are new releases weekly – the current release is v. 2.7. The default user interface is three panes. Folders on the left, feeds in the middle and posts on the right. Importing OPML files is a snap, you can read feeds offline (a big benefit over web based readers), and they are actively supporting Dave Winer’s idea (although no integration yet). Each pane has scroll bars, meaning, like Bloglines, you can scroll through the pane without losing your place in other panes (something that drives me crazy with other readers). Like all readers it seems, Blogbridge does a poor job properly rendering HTML, so posts look a little off. Blogbridge also has to assist users in finding feeds relevant to their interests. Lots of people I know and respect are on that list, including , , , and . I’m a big fan of open source projects, and Blogbridge is an excellent reader. Blogbridge is located in Arlington, Mass.
|
CourseCafe Adds to the Social Bookmarking Discussion
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 31 |
is a search and social bookmarking tool for students that the founder, Puneet Gupta, demo’d at TagCamp last weekend. The company is located in Mountain View and is angel funded. At first blush, the question came to mind as to why students can’t just use existing search tools like Google and social bookmarking applications like del.icio.us to handle their research needs. After the demo I understood why CourseCafe may be compelling for students to use on top of existing services. The site, which is currently under closed beta, has automatically uploaded entire course schedules for most colleges and universities in the U.S. Students can quickly add the courses they are taking. As the company gets some history behind it, the bookmarks saved from previous semesters in the same course will stay available to students, giving them a good start on finding relevant web documents. Search is integrated directly into the site using Yahoo and Google APIs. A bookmarklet is also available for sites found outside of CourseCafe. Bookmarking and tagging a link is straightforward and functional. All students of a course that bookmark items will be able to see other’s bookmarks, creating additional value for students (and reasons to use the site). There are other great features as well, such as limiting searches to .edu sites. CourseCafe is young and raw right now. But if they can find a way to tap into the ( ), there’s a good chance they’ll have some success. There are obvious product extensions as well, such as hosting notes and other course information.
|
Verisign Acquires Weblogs.com
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 6 |
Verisign has their acquisition of the ping server network and related assets. See the Verisign as well. We aren’t going to write a lot about it here on TechCrunch because and I were advisors to Weblogs.com on the deal. I will say that I believe this is a game-changing event for the blogosphere. Dave Winer, the founder of Weblogs.com and the inventor of blog ping servers (and kindly mentions our involvement). If you’d like to understand more about ping servers, I wrote a in July of this year. For more coverage, you should also read , , and . Congratulations, . You deserve this, my friend.
|
Real Estate vertical search with Trulia
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 30 |
is a vertical search engine for real estate. Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen, Stanford MBAs, founded Trulia in 2004, and just moved their ten person company into shiny new offices in San Francisco. Trulia is currently angel funded. The site launched a month ago with California listings only. Trulia will be rolling out new states (the next one will be this week) in the near future. Like Oodle, Trulia pulls its content from multiple, distributed sources. In Trulia’s case, its data is indexed from real estate professionals’ websites, where the most detailed information on home listings is located. Trulia often has listings that aren’t included in the MLS, either because the agent hasn’t uploaded the listing yet, or for some new home construction, they never appear in the MLS at all. The site, which is advertiser supported, has excellent integration with Google maps and provides email and RSS notifications of new search results. Another feature that I really like are the statistics. For any given search, Trulia will show statistics on average home prices per bedroom (but for some reason no average across all home listings), average time a home is on the market, average price per square foot, etc. Trulia does not show for sale by owner listings at this time. Their main goal, in addition to providing a rich user experience, is to serve real estate professionals by lowering their marketing costs and driving traffic to their websites. Pete tells me that indexing information from professionals’ sites is not easy – it has to be properly parsed and formatted for re-display on Trulia, and duplicate listings removed (some websites show listings from third party agents).
|
Will Sphere Solve the Blog Relevance Problem?
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 8 |
writes about , a new blog search service that appears to be getting ready to launch. Sphere is taking a crack at building a more relevant blog search engine. Traditional link analysis just doesn’t work with blog posts because new posts don’t have time to gather links. Instead, Sphere seems to be be trying to determine blog authority on a given subject area, and determine new authoritative blogs based on who those blogs point to. From Sphere’s page: It starts with relevant results and fast performance. Our new relevance-based algorithm discovers new blog posts as they’re created, indexes them within minutes of being published, applies rich semantic analysis and makes them searchable by relevance or time. Plus, we’ve got a few fun, helpful features that we think make for a richer user experience. Of course, there is no way to tell if Sphere has cracked the blog search relevance problem until they launch. I’m looking forward to finding out. Thanks for pointing me to this.
|
Speak With Me – Control Your Car by Voice
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 30 |
I had the opportunity to sit down with Ajay Juneja, the founder of Mountain View based , at Tag Camp this weekend. I had a half hour demo in his car and was completely blown away by what he’s created. You can see pictures of Ajay and his car . What’s so special about his car? He’s layered a proprietary dialog manager, which semantically parses and analyzes data, on top of off-the-shelf speech recognition software, to create one kick ass computer system that is controlled with an array microphone. It allows you to control your car via speech. It was jaw-droppingly impressive. For the demo, Ajay controlled his stereo system verbally, changing songs, picking tracks, controlling volume, etc. The commands he used to do this were in absolutely plain English and varied considerably in structure. For instance, Ajay at one time said “go to track 3”. Another time he said “play for me another one bites the dust”. Later, “I would like to hear wonderful tonight by eric clapton. “louder”. “quieter”. Everything worked. No errors. Perfect. He repeatedly tried to trick the system by asking for a song with the wrong artist, etc. The system simply asked him, in its charmingly computerish voice, whether he wanted to hear the song, or a song by the artist. Ajay then showed me their navigation product, which will integrate into car’s existing nav systems. Drivers will be able to control many aspects of the driving experience verbally once this product is commercially available. I didn’t want to get out of the car. Frankly, I wanted to find a way to steal his car. months ago at BarCamp. He agreed (verbally) to a non disclosure agreement and couldn’t talk much about it. Now, Ajay’s company has advanced enough that he is talking about many aspects of the product, and giving demo’s, without NDAs in place. Ajay graduated from the computer science program, with a minor in robotics, at Carnegie Mellon University. He also took graduate courses at the language technologies institute (see also the speech to speech product all over the web today, which is has also been developed at Carnegie Mellon), where this software has been under development for ten years. The original Carnegie Mellon researcher on the technology behind speakwithme is Matthias Denecke, who is now an advisor to Ajay. Speak With Me will not be commercially available until at least late 2007, when it will be built directly into cars (they are negotiating deals now) and available at high end car stereo shops. The car stereo product will be around $400-$600, and the navigation system will be in the $2,500 range. They will also offer additional services. One example – the car’s voice can be a celebrity. Ajay asked me how I’d like to have Paris Hilton, or whoever, interact with me to control my stereo and navigation system. Yep, I’d be up for that.
|
Del.icio.us Expands Search Feature
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 24 |
reports that has extended its existing user-only search to everyone. search was available only if you were logged in to your del.icio.us account. Check it out on any del.icio.us page, including . Joshua Schachter has not yet written about this on the . Search functionality has also been expanded. In addition to showing your own results in addition to everyone else’s, you can search using “and” (such as apples oranges) to drill down into more relevant results. Results are returned if the query term is contained withint the title of the bookmark and/or within tags. : Per Joshua’s comments below (the founder of del.icio.us), del.icio.us comments are also searched. You can use “tag:tagname” to just search tags. If you are going to do multiple tag search, AND must be capitalized. I like the extended functionality a lot. also posts some very interesting del.icio.us stats.
|
Google Reader – Beautiful, Needs Work
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 8 |
Google a web-based yesterday at Web2.0. The coverage saturated . Unlike Bloglines, which uses frames to avoid page refreshes, Google Reader uses Ajax. The reader is visually stunning and at first glance appeared to be a contender. However, upon further review we’ve found what we consider to be some serious structural flaws. The reader loads quickly and uses your stored gmail credentials to sign you in. Adding feeds is fairly easy via opml upload (which we did) or using the search bar. As you add feeds you have the option of adding tags (called “labels”). Individual posts are listed on the left – clicking on a post brings up the content in the view box on the right. Google Reader is actually Google’s second RSS reader. See as well, which Google launched in late July. Unlike Google IG, which targets light RSS users who only read a few feeds, their new reader is targeted at those who want to move through a lot of feeds quickly. There are a lot of positive features. The reader uses ajax quite effectively to avoid page refreshes and to create a great visual experience. Feeds can be tagged, and individual posts can be kept unread and starred. The search functionality is excellent, and adding feeds requires no knowledge of RSS, opml or XML. It’s all automatic. Search only pulls up feeds you aren’t already subscribed to. As I mentioned above, Google Reader is targeting heavy RSS readers. The product isn’t useful, however, for moving through a large number of feeds efficiently. Posts are listed in order of “relevance” (which doesn’t seem to actually sort things in any relevant way), or by date. I need posts to be grouped under the individual blog because I read some feeds first – Google Reader doesn’t allow me to do this and I am frustrated trying to find the authors I like to read the most. There is no search functionality within feeds already subscribed to, so there is no way to find this content. The reader is slow. Paging down through posts results in a long and unacceptable delay. As a side note, importing my OPML list took about 10 minutes. Since this was a one-time cost, it’s not that big of a deal. Since this is a web-based reader only, there is no syncronization. Google uses ajax instead of frames. While frames is an old technology, readers using it allow for multiple scroll bars – this means you can keep the feed frames locked while scrolling through individual posts. This needs to be addressed. There is no unsubscribe button for feeds. Google Reader is optimized for Firefox. It isn’t working properly on other browsers yet. Many of the feature limitations can be addressed, but Google Reader has a long way to go if it is going to seriously threaten existing heavy-duty RSS readers. also posts a lengthy review of Google Reader.
|
A Second Look at Inform.com
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 24 |
on last week following their launch and a fluffy article in the New York Times. Inform.com’s goal is to provide a useful news interface – both blog and non-blog – and to show the interconnectedness of all of the content. We had a number of concerns with the service. It’s a full page popup to ensure that they entirely control the user experience. It doesn’t work properly in Firefox. You are limited to reading the content they provide (you can’t add content they haven’t included in the service). The scroll button on the mouse doesn’t work. Etc. I received an email from Julian Steinberg, the project manager at Inform, a few days after my initial post. He offered a point-by-point response to each of my criticisms. We followed up with a phone call today. I am re-printing his email below (with his permission), and I want to point out a few positive aspects of the service as well that I discovered after he walked me through it. Mike, I read your review of Inform’s beta launch, and would like to take you up on your offer to clarify a few things about our product. Hopefully this will help you see some value in the product, even in its beta form. Most importantly – and as you pointed out – we recognize the need to improve site usability and other shortcomings in performance. However, given the powerful new tools inherent in the product today, combined with our personal frustration consuming and using news, we felt the trade offs of putting out an early release were worth it. Below are responses to your specific points, followed by some of what differentiates Inform. * Inform isn’t an RSS reader. While the ability to add RSS feeds to Inform will be incorporated into an upcoming release, we are not an RSS reader today. However, you can ‘subscribe’ to any of the sources we cover today, including blogs, in a similar way to RSS feeds, and read them by section. Unlike many RSS readers, we crawl every article on every source we cover and include all the articles from each publication, whereas RSS readers may only include a portion of a publisher’s content. * The only difference when using Inform with Firefox versus IE 6.0, is that we do not display articles directly within our reader. Instead they pop-up in a new window or tab, which some users prefer while others clearly do not. Otherwise, the functionality is identical in the two browsers. We are committed to continuing to support Firefox users and working to enhance their experience. * Inform often displays two scrollable windows on many pages. To activate a window for scrolling, you must click inside it first (similar to Outlook Web Access or a product that has multiple panes). Michael, this might be a better conversation than email exchange. We are genuinely interested in your feedback and I’d welcome the opportunity to discuss this by phone with you. I can be reached at 646 722 XXXX. We have a lot of enhancements planned for the future, and hope you will bear with us while we continue to improve Inform. Julian Steinberg This was a reasonable and articulate response to a fairly aggressive post. And other than the scroll wheel funtionality (it doesn’t work), his counterpoints are good ones. Here’s what I learned from the walk through: This is a beta, so thin content is excusable. They do an excellent job of relating content to other content via topics (basically keywords). They do a great job with filtered tagging (searching across multiplie keywords like “miami” and “football”), something no real time search engine does today and which is a really useful way of drilling down into new content. You can also toggle on/off blog and non-blog news. New feature releases over the next couple of months include a video seach and viewing tool, better firefox integration and the ability to add feeds that are not currently already included at Inform. I’m looking forward to all of this.
|
Annotating Your Web with Stickis
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 24 |
In 1999 Eng-Sion Tan launched a company called Third Voice, a browser plug-in that created a sidebar on web pages and allowed surfers to annotate the page by adding their comments. The service quickly devolved into web graffiti and two years later. Even though Third Voice is gone, the idea had some value. And soon will be that has some of the characteristics of Third Voice, but which will not have the same graffiti result. They call it . Stickis is still in private alpha. I don’t have credentials yet (they are keeping it very quiet and don’t want screen shots on the web), but Marc and Jean came by last week to give me a peak at the service. You can . To be honest, it took me a while to get it. The reason: they’ve built a platform that has at least two or three killer applications and I saw so much in so short a time that I was getting lost. I slowed things down by asking dumb questions and, in the process became pretty fired up about stickis in general. Once you are registered, you can add a “sticki” to any web page with your notes, which can be in the form of text or dragged in images. Every time you return to that page you can pull up your sticki. For lots of sites that I interact with, the ability to keep these notes is very interesting. Notes can be shared with friends or kept private. You can also subscribe to feeds from other sites, and if those feeds have linked to the current site you are visiting that content will also appear in the stickis. For instance, If you were to go to the Sticki site, and you had subscribed to the TechCrunch feed, you would see this post included in the sticki. They’ve also included a master page to manage the content you’ve distributed on various pages, and add feeds and friend’s content. Marc and Jean are in the process of raising an angel round – everything to date has been created on their own dime and with their own time. They’ve been working on it for about a year.
|
The PostSecret Book
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 23 |
Frank Warren the creator of the increasingly is now coming out with a book entitled . The PostSecret book is a hardcover with 288 pages published by Harper Collins/Regan Books. Inside, there are hundreds of color images of postcards. Many of the PostSecrets have never been seen before. Postsecret has been a favorite site of mine. I wrote (getting their permission to post more than a single image). Thousands of people have sent postcards that tell a secret fear, regret, hope, fantasty, betrayal, confession, hope or experience. Some of them are touching to the point of incredible sadness or elation. The site is wonderful. The rules? “Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before”. .
|
Dave Winer Joins Web 2.0 WorkGroup
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 12 |
I am very pleased to announce that , written by , has joined our . See our introduction to the here. is one of Dave’s blogs where he writes longer, essay style posts on web 2.0 topics. Unlike Scripting News, Dave allows comments and trackbacks on this site. It is an excellent resource for web 2.0 thinking and news. From the : The Two-Way-Web is a vision for the Web as an easy writing and publishing environment. It’s not a new idea, in fact it’s the original vision of the Web as defined by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee who said in December 1997: “The intuitive editing interfaces which make authoring a natural part of daily life are still maturing.” Most of the other companies interested in these technologies want to build a network of money, goods and services. I applaud this, but this is not my goal. I want to turn the Web into a powerful and easy to use writing environment. Welcome, Dave! UPDATE: and write on this too. Richard includes a picture from dinner (larger version of the one to the left).
|
Yelp's Local Reviews
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 12 |
is a website that allows users to write and share reviews of local businesses. It also has social networking features (adding friends, groups, etc.) to share reviews with a trust network. The idea is that people generally trust their freinds’ recommendations. All of this user-generated content on local businesses, combined with the Yelp search engine, also provides great inventory for Yelp to sell local businesses contextual advertising. The basics of Yelp: create an account, fill in your profile, add friends and write reviews. Yelp attempts to auto-fill the business information on a new review. The review consists of a 1-5 star rating and a free text area. Searches bring up local businesses based on your zip code and include paid advertising above reviews. Yelp is available only in San Francisco currently and plans to expand to other cities over time. They are also rumored to be closing on a Series A financing. There are a number of other companies that are targeting local business reviews in an almost identical way. For instance, check out , and idealabs’ .
|
Memeorandum is Changing the Web
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 12 |
I’ve previously profiled , and there are no major announcements or feature releases to spur this new post. However, something much more significant is happening because of Memeorandum, and I am not the only person to notice it. If you don’t know about yet, check out the site and . Memeorandum is the “newspaper” for anyone interested in what’s happening in or . Regarding my statement in the title of this post, I really do believe that Memeorandum is forcing a subtle but important shift in the way many of us use the web. Memeorandum finds blog posts, newspaper articles and press releases that are being heavily linked to in near real time and puts them up on the site. The position and size of the headline is indicative of its importance (determined by number of links and other factors, such as how much people are writing about the linked content). The higher up and bigger the headline, the more important it is. And linking sites, , are clustered underneath the headline. This means you can find out in near real time what is important in technology (or politics), how important it is, and who’s talking about it. If you then post on the subject, you will be linked into the discussion as well. If I have limited time and I need to find out what’s going on, I turn to Memeorandum. I am on this site at least 15 times a day. I am finding that reading feeds in my reader (the old way I used to find out what was hot) takes much longer, has a much longer lag time, and significantly more noise (Memeorandum has virtually no noise – everything is relevant). So Memeorandum is changing my reading behavior, but it is also changing my writing behavior. It is much easier for me to find and read everything that is being written about a topic (Memeorandum also includes links to the real time search engines for additional material). I find that I am more educated on the topics I write about, and am writing more often about things the web feels are important at the time. , but it is the most useful tool I have to discover real time content on the web.
|
Measure Map To Launch by Year End
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 12 |
Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path about for the first time today. Measure Map is an incredibly easy to use flash and ajax application that monitors blog traffic and analytics in many, many different ways. You can slice data almost every way imaginable. I’ll do a full review as soon as I have their permission. In his post, Jeffrey provides a of the dashboard of the application, the first to appear publicly on the web. I took this as permission to post my own screen shot to the left. They have not finalized pricing, but my understanding is it may be free for everything except real-time data. Jeffrey also says that the application should be launched by end of year. If you want to try it out sooner, request a beta account at their . Here is our quick pitch: Measure Map is a Web application that helps people get to know their blogs. We do this by collecting and analyzing blog-specific traffic statistics and presenting them in a browsable interface that encourages exploration. It is an experience that offers meaningful insight into the effects caused by small changes in how you blog, rather than the overwhelming complexity of most web stats tools with their query/report-style analytic methods. Measure Map provides understanding by refocusing the difficult problem of web statistics and solving it just for blogs. We do this with a few lines of code in your blog’s template; there’s hardly any configuration to worry about. We collect your traffic data continuously and in real time and display it through some innovative Ajax-based techniques. But even though we’re a hosted service, you own your data. An open API will empower you to do whatever you like with your numbers — we’ve already built an OS X Dashboard widget, for example. Imagine what else you could do with your blog’s stats… We’ll be opening the doors soon — probably towards the end of the year. For now, we’re metering our growth with an invitation system to ensure that we can provide an appropriate level of service for our users as we grow. You can sign up for one at measuremap.com. In the coming weeks I’ll be writing more about Measure Map, the experience of building it, and what our plans for it are. But for now, I’m just so happy our little team has reached this milestone. Now back to work. We’ve been testing and (scroll through search results) measure map for some time, and are big fans. A funny side note: At the web 2.0 conference last week I was talking with Kevin Burton and Andy Smith about some of the new applications we are excited about. Measure Map came up, and they asked for a demo because they hadn’t seen it. Some tall guy in the room joined us and listened while I demo’d the product for them. That tall guy turned out to be Jeffrey Veen – I hadn’t met him in person yet and so didn’t recognize him. At the end of the demo, when I still didn’t know who he was, he started clicking links and showing data I didn’t even know about. Some of it was incredibly cool stuff. I looked at his nametag and everything of course fell into place. Very funny.
|
Wink – People Powered Search
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 12 |
gave a brief and we were immediately hooked. Wink is still in private beta (you can request an account on their home page), but I’ve had a chance to talk with CEO Michael Tanne and I’ve been using it all week. At its core Wink is a search engine, and they’ve intelligently layered in shared user participation to give fresh, meaningful results that, Wink argues, can’t be found anywhere else. The key user participation features are tagging, rating and sharing. Our goal at Wink is to combine search with user participation to give you fresher, more accurate, spam-free search. You can create tags, rate results and keep track of sites you’ve visited. You can create Search Sets of tags that show your expertise in a subject, and you can make those publicly available to be shared with other people. Wink also has concepts that are created and updated by users like you, so feel free to edit existing concepts, or even write your own! Because Wink is “people-powered”, it will only get better when people tag, rate, and share. So please make Wink your default search engine, use it everyday, and let us know how you like it. And if you help us out by contributing or giving us feedback, we’ll give you some invitations of your own to send out! Core search results are provided by Google and wikipedia. A search query returns those results, which you can tag and rate from 0-5 stars. A zero rating help to block out spam and other bad content, eventually removing it from the index altogether. This user-created metadata (when aggregated) helps Wink return more relevant results to the entire community. Wink has taken del.icio.us bookmark data to fill out their results with rich tagging content right from the start. For future queries, tagged/rated results appear above normal search results. Also within search results is an area where Wink users are listed that have tagged results with the query used. Clicking on any user takes you to a page that shows all of their public tags and ratings. If you find that you like a user’s tags and ratings, you can subscribe to those results via RSS. There are a ton of other features as well that I am discovering as I use the service. For instance, you can create a “search set” (it reminds me of ) that combines links to favorite sites along with tags. As a side note, people are realizing that user-generated metadata may be the key to improving search results. Google has taken early steps in this direction with their early bookmarking product. In our , one of the that Google may be experimenting in this area. Perfect timing for Wink!
|
RememberTheMilk To Do Lists
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 13 |
is a new ajax-rich to-do list that is similar to 37 Signal’s . RememberTheMilk lists are organized by tabs. Items are easily entered (although there is an extra click in there that bugs me). Clicking between lists is very straightforward. Items can be easily reordered. And you can also share lists and/or choose to make them public. One thing RememberTheMilk does very well is to allow lots of metadata to be associated with a single task. Priorities can be set with a nice color-coded system, and there is flexibility in setting done-by dates. You can also add notes to a task. A really nice feature is the ability to add tasks via email. Reminders can be sent via email, instant messaging or sms. You can also subscribe to lists via RSS. Overall, using RememberTheMilk is a much richer experience than Ta-Da Lists. Setting date reminders is particularly useful. However, there is a definite tradeoff in ease-of-use. Using Ta-Da Lists require no training, while I seem to be referring to the RememberTheMilk FAQs constantly to understand functionality. RememberTheMilk was Emily Boyd, Omar Kilani and a stuffed animal named Bob T. Monkey (I prefer myself). :-)
|
Qumana's Simple Ad Inclusion for Blogs
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 13 |
is an excellent wysiwyg online/offline tool for editing blogs. about and described their service, which is completely free. Yesterday Qumana v 2.0 of their product. The primary feature addition is the ability to easily, very easily, add pay-per-click ads directly into blog posts. Ads can be positioned anywhere, and there are a couple of formatting options to choose from (see arrows in screen shot below). Revenues are split 50/50 between Qumana and the publisher. Ads are keyword driven based on tags you set for the post, and flow into RSS without any problems. Each Ad is tracked by keyword and clicks. Ads can also be previewed before final posting. The publisher has the flexibility to add as many or as few ads as he or she desires. There are additional new features as well, including improved old post edits, better drag and drop tools, and better integration with wordpress and blogger. This is the best tool I’ve seen for small (and large) bloggers to easily include ads in posts.
|
First Screen Shot of Sphere
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 14 |
I met with , one of the founders of , today at our office (ok, its a house, but it’s also an office – just ask the IRS). Sphere is a new blog search engine that quite frankly blows everything, and I mean everything, I’ve seen out of the water in terms of relevance (and, by the way, design…Adaptive Path was involved). The timing for this meeting was perfect – right on the heels of Yahoo’s new , and Robert Scobles already-classic post “ “. Tony, along with co-founders Steve Nieker and Martin Remy, and advisors Matt Mullenweg, Mary Hodder and Toni Schnieder, have created Sphere in a very short period of time and for “less than $200k”. I saw the live site and was allowed to bang on it as much as I liked. I did, and came away very impressed. Relevance in blog search is very difficult. Google-type PageRank analysis, which looks at incoming links to a piece of content, simply doesn’t work because new content doesn’t have much in the way of links. Until now, no one has come up with a way to properly sort blog posts by relevance, and the general default way of showing results is “reverse-chrono”, which simply puts the newest stuff at the top. Sphere appears to have solved the problem, or at least taken big steps in the right direction. Their approach involves three key algorithms – an analysis of links into and out of a , an analysis of metadata around a post (links, post frequency, length of posts, etc.), and something Tony calls their “secret sauce”, which is content semantic analysis to filter out spam and to understand what a blog post is talking about. Result sets show only two posts per blog on the first page, so no one blog can dominate a category. The result set has auto-generated profiles of blogs that include recent links in and out of the blog, average posts per week, average words per post and a link to a full page profile that can be edited by the blog author. To the right of the main result set are blog (as opposed to post) links that are relevant to the query, and something they call the “Daily Sphere”, which is links to relevant non-blog news stories. I imagine they may add additional content in the side area as well. The results page integrates both ajax and flash features in an intelligent way (it’s not there just for show). While Sphere has been indexing blogs since January of 2003, their index only shows results for the previous four months. They will lengthen this window as they scale up operations. Sphere has tens of thousands of beta requests and is opening up to 100 lucky people this weekend. .
|
Podtech and SolutionWatch Join Web 2.0 WorkGroup
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 14 |
If you haven’t seen the yet, check it out. My original . We’ve added two new resources – and . Podtech.net is a very popular podcast site hosted by John Furrier that is redefining corporate press practices. Recently, for instance, Yahoo gave Podtech an pre-announcement right to discuss their last weekend. SolutionWatch, written by Brian Benzinger, focuses on new companies and products that are defining the web 2.0 landscape. Much like TechCrunch, Brian is helping to put perspective on how these products fit into the overall web ecosystem. Check out Podtech’s podcast discussion of the group . Podtech.net and SolutionWatch join , TechCrunch, , and as the early resources . More are coming soon.
|
Ma.gnolia: More Social Bookmarking
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 22 |
I’m looking forward to seeing what is all about. It appears to be a social bookmarking service with a twist of some sort. I hope its a good twist because this space is getting a bit crowded to say the least. Ma.gnolia describes itself as “Found is the New Search” and “Social Bookmarking to build an information community online”, adding: What you mark in Ma.gnolia not only stays found but keeps coming back to you as your interests change. That’s our pitch, plain and simple, and it’s why we say that found is the new search. If you’d like to be one of the first to see exactly what we mean, just enter your email below. You’ll be notified of our launch and become one of the first members of the Ma.gnolia community, where we believe you’ll discover the new evolution in growing and sharing information across town or across the globe. You may even be invited to participate in Ma.gnolia’s December 2005 Beta Launch. They promise a beta in December 2005. I’m skeptical of companies that continue to launch with these domain name abominations (dropping vowels, using random ccTLDs and lots of extra dots), but if the service rocks, I will forgive all. sounds promising.
|
Thank You For Coming To Our Party
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 22 |
I believe we had as many as 200 people here last night for . The last of the guests left at 4 am. Thank you to everyone who came and everyone who tried to attend via festoon. Scott Beale took my of the event. Here’s : Kevin Burton hard at work on TailRank – using my oven as a desk. Thanks to our very generous we were able to cater the event and provide t-shirts for everyone. You can also from Zazzle. There were too many demos but . It was exciting to see the first public view of Sphere, and meet some of the entrepreneurs behind the other companies as well. Thank you to everyone who took the time to show us their products. Dave Winer gave a rousing keynote that got everyone fired up. People are calling it the . The always cool and his wife were in costume (picture also shows Keith Teare). Robert Scoble was here for hours and barely left the back room where we were showing raw demos of the really young companies, including . VCs were roaming the party, looking for the next great investment. Google, Yahoo and ebay all had product managers, developers and business development people quietly talking to entrepreneurs. Scott Beale, Tara Hunt and others were taking pictures of (Flickr tag for your photos is “techcrunch” – please post them!). It was Web 2.0 perfection. The only problem was the whole festoon remote participation idea didn’t work out at all. People couldn’t see or hear anything. Someone created a very funny festoon image and defaced the wiki this morning. Instead of deleting it, . That kind of creativity shouldn’t be deleted. We’ll get it right next time. :-) Then there was the whole keg situation. We never did get the damn thing to produce beer, even after a number of geeks and ex-bartenders . Clearly we didn’t have the at the event (via ). The best thing about these parties is that we all get the chance to get to know each other a little bit better, and intensely cross-pollinate ideas. I am keeping a running directory below of blog posts and pictures from the event. Please email me if you’ve written about it with the link. (tag: techcrunch), , , , , , , , , , , (you were here in spirit Richard), , , , , , , , , , (good overview of demoing companies), (great idea on people bringing their own nametags…Jeff Clavier did this).
|
VideoEgg News
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 25 |
is a web-based publishing service that allows users to capture video content from virtually any device and format and publish it to the web. We profiled it on , just after they launched at DEMO. that VideoEgg is moving the company from New Haven, Connecticut to Silicon Valley. Michael also reports more interesting news – that VideoEgg has launched a partnership with Six Apart that allows TypePad users to using Videoegg technology. Check out interview with Mena Trott of Six Apart and VideoEgg co-founder Kevin Sladek as well. VideoEgg, which is incredibly easy to use with just about any video device, is now directly available to a huge blogging base. My hope is that someone creates a wordpress plugin next. Congratulations to the VideoEgg team on this partnership. I’m looking forward to having you in the neighborhood as well. :-)
|
Google Base to Launch
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 25 |
Reports are out that Google Base will be launching soon, perhaps even today. Dirson has a up on Flickr and additional images are on . Google Base appears to be a service to publish content directly to google and have them host it in a centralized way. If so, this would be going completely against the accelerating trend of decentralized publishing. My prediction: when the dust settles, this will either be largely ignored or universally hated. Centralized content is boring…so much is going on at the edge of the web, why would anyone try to put it all back in the center? has more details, including the text from the screen shot below: Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free. Examples of items you can find in Google Base: • Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in and other Google products like and . Tom Oliveri, Product Marketing Manager at Google, has posted a on the Google blog: You may have seen stories today reporting on a new product that we’re testing, and speculating about our plans. Here’s what’s really going on. We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps. We think it’s an exciting product, and we’ll let you know when there’s more news. Thanks .
|
Kaboodle Launch: Bookmarking + Wiki
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 10 | 25 |
opened its doors this afternoon for an official launch on Wednesday. I met with Manish Chandra, the CEO, earlier today for a walk through and came away very impressed. In addition to Manish, Kaboodle’s founders include Keiron McCammon and Chetan Pungaliya. Kaboodle is a free social bookmarking service. And it really does take things to the next level in terms of usefulness, particularly for certain types of stuff. For instance, Kaboodle really shines when bookmarking ecommerce content. The after registration is add a kaboodle button to your browser. When you click to bookmark content, you are redirected to Kaboodle where you select a “page” (topic). Content is auto-selected, including an image. A click lets you change or add to the content and/or select a new image. Once you’ve added content to a page you can choose to make it public or private, and share it with others. New content can be added to a page from other sites. Each piece of content can be rated by others, and free-text comments can be added. It is an excellent way to collaborate with others in comparing and contrasting related content. In fact, in many ways Kaboodle reminds me of a wiki once the collaboration on a page begins. Coming soon functionality includes page badges, search and RSS for users and pages. I’d also like to see tagging functionality added to pages and individual pieces of content. Om Malik wrote a a few hours ago. In my opinion Manish Chandra and the rest of the team have done a great job rolling this out. They are talking to bloggers and mainstream press simultaneously, and the site is a textbook example of how to walk new users through how the service works. They’ve thought through launch strategy and usability in a very intelligent way.
|
Profile: Feedburner (New Features)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 4 |
Chicago
Feedburner had a “Hackathon” (see ) day last Thursday, where engineers dropped their projects for a day and worked on new features that could be designed, implemented and tested in a single day. They came up with seven new features ( ): – – alert FeedBurner that your blog has been updated and would like FeedBurner to update your FeedBurner feed now, instead of waiting for the normal 30 minute auto-renew.
– – add geographic position to your FeedBurner feed.
– – allows you to change the title and/or description of your feed without changing anything in your source feed or in your blogging tool.
– – notify you of any errors FeedBurner encounters when regularly processing your source feed.
– – with Awareness API enabled, allows you to get a daily ticker to place on your blog, displaying whether your circulation is going up or down.
– – enhancement to SmartCast service beyond audio and video enclosures.
– – view your feed’s circulation with the new StatsTracker widget for Mac OS X Dashboard. Our favorites are the new ping server (the weblogs.com ping server will be profiled here soon) for fast updates, and the circulation ticker (neat tool to put on your blog). I’m trying to dig up a mac while Keith is on vacation to try out the statstracker widget.
|
Profile: DinnerBuzz
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 3 |
June 2005 Dinnerbuzz is a new service that allows users to provide feedback on restaurants, bars and coffee shops. It leverages user-provided metadata (including tagging) to allow others to easily find and read content on restaurants. In their own words, So, what we have with Dinnerbuzz is a new social networking site that leverages user tagging. We note two emerging trends in the web 2.0 space. The first trend is the huge proliferation of new social networks/tagging services and the difficulty as a user in keeping up. The second trend is the “problem” with user tagging. With regard to the first trend, we’ve all been thinking about it, and John Battelle pointed it out in a recent (discussed here previously) – The second trend is the “problem” with user tagging. People need an incentive or they just won’t do it (see our profiles on and – ) These will sort themselves out over time, with winners and losers, but new companies thinking of adding these features, or basing themselves on them, need to think forward or risk being a loser. Back to Dinnerbuzz: Is there an incentive for user tagging? We’ll wait and see. Anyone can search Dinnerbuzz for restaurants and read reviews. There are a number of great search options. Every city has a set page, and from there searches can be done by tag (like “mexican”) and/or rating (up to 10). Once a sufficient number of restaurants have been rated in a city, it could be a very useful way of searching for a good new restaurant. RSS feeds are available for everything, from monitoring a single city, restaurant or user’s reviews, to reading new reviews as they come in. For instance, you can see our profile and reviews (we really, really like in Manhattan Beach – I’m trying to figure out an angle where I can call it “web 2.0” and profile it here :-)) and there is a big fat XML button right there in the middle of the page. This is all very well done. Once you’ve registered (simple, no captcha or email verification), you can post your own reviews. The first step is typing in the restaurant name and location. Dinnerbuzz uses the yahoo mapping for local search. Submitting a restaurant consists of entering its name and location, adding tags and comments (free text) and rating it from 1-10: If Dinnerbuzz can’t find a perfect match for your restaurant it suggests a few close matches. If there are no close matches, there is an option to add a location. Overall, adding and reviewing a restaurant is a good experience for US locations, but there are two problems (one easily fixed). First, the options include all yahoo local search options, so you see real estate brokers, plumbers, dentists, etc. for close matches (no idea if this is “fixable” within the Yahoo api constraints). Second, if there are close matches, there is no “add” button if one of the matches isn’t correct (easy to add this). – great integration with Yahoo Local data
– search by tag, rating or tag+ rating
– every city has a city page, users can then sort by tag and/or rating
– easy submit of new location
– publishers can add new location if no match with Yahoo Local
– RSS everywhere (yeah!) – ability to add or delete entries
– expand “add” functionality when there are close matches (not just no match)
– add friends and see/subscribe to their reviews
– fix non-restaurant data in close matches Dinnerbuzz is a cool experiment and most of its obvious flaws are easily fixed (and they are adding features) If they can tie it in with other social networking services it could become a very useful service over time.
( )
( )
( )
|
Profile: Extisp.icio.us
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 4 |
June 2005 Extispicious has two tools built on the back of delicious ( ) data: for viewing a random scattering of a user’s delicious tags, sized according to number of times used by that user, and for viewing a random set of yahoo images based on search results for that user’s tags. Each tag is clickable and goes to the relevant delicious page for that user and tag. As a visual, here is the scatter for Kevin Davis, the creator:
The is less interesting (we use it primarily to flag content to post on later). Each image is clickable. The result set is extremely random but interesting to view:
Overall, this is an interesting experiment that may evolve, and it will certainly inspire others to try new things. See our for another interesting application built on the top of delicious data.
( )
(love those frames)
|
Profile: Venture Voice
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 5 |
June 8, 2005 Venture Voice produces podcasts of interviews with interesting people. In their own words, Like ( ), they are interviewing some very high profile and interesting people in the technology industry. In the short time they’ve been live they’ve posted interviews with: Dick Costolo of FeedBurner ( ) ( )
of AdBrite (FuckedCompany founder)
Joe Kraus of JotSpot ( ) ( ) Not bad for a site that’s less than a month old. Heck, maybe someday TechCrunch will be on the A List and get interviewed by Venture Voice. :-) We look forward to hearing more from Venture Voice.
|
Web 2.0 This Week (June 26 – July 1)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 2 |
Beginning today, we are going to link to and summarize important web 2.0 developments, essays, posts and announcements published during the previous week. Many of you may read Richard MacManus’ excellent web 2.0 Weekly Wrapup at his site ( ). Richard, don’t think of this as stealing your idea. Rather, please consider our relatively poor imitation as a very sincere form of flattery. :-)
More info on the fund . “Google maps with Craigslist is the first true Web 2.0 application, neither of the sites was involved…a developer put it together,” he said. “Hackers are teaching the industry what to do.” This is an excellent essay that Troy wrote that describes the natural evolution of a site from web 1.0 to web 2.0. The Vertical Leap conference was held on Tuesday, June 28 and was a must-attend event for those interested in search and web 2.0. Techcrunch profile . Our discussion of the Microsoft announcement is . Their announcement is a big deal. And so is attention.xml (or at least it can be).
Lots more to read here. Thanks, Richard. One last one… . Explained by Jason Calcanis .
|
Profile: TagCloud
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 5 |
June 2005 Bellwood, PA Corporate name is TagCloud is a service that generates a “tagcloud” (see below) based on provided URLs or feeds. A tagcloud is basically a grouping of tags associated with content, from a single or multiple sources. Tagclouds are a visual tool – tags used more often are bigger and/or darker than less used tags, allowing a visual representation of relative tag use. Clicking on a tag takes the user to relevant content related to the tag – basically a list of content associated with such tag (ranking is usually by date, or freshness, but this is not a requirement. TagCloud is a tool for creating tagclouds. A key fact to point out right at the start is that TagCloud uses keyword (text) analysis, not tag/category analysis, in creating the tag cloud. This is a point of contention (or at least discussion) around the service and worth noting as you read on. Here’s a visual example of a tagcloud (remember that in a real tag cloud each item is clickable and links to relevant content): The reason tagclouds are useful, instead of merely visually entertaining, is that they show in a very clear way the most popular tags and link directly to associated content. (underlined because I am going to point back to this post in 2 years and say “I told you so”). If you are mathematically inclined, I highly recommend reading Pietro Speroni’s three articles on tagclouds linked to below (see Links). There really is something to this other than a neat visual trick. TagClouds is an easy to use service, and other than the contentious issue of using text/keyword analysis instead of category/tag analysis, the only problem is that they are extremely slow to generate. Since a key feature is adding these to your blog, the load time can be prohibitively long. An easy fix would be for Tagcloud to cache content periodically and present that cached (and slightly dated) content instead of re-generating the tag cloud on every html or xml call – I assume they are considering this. The speed issue is a killer and I would much prefer slightly old data instead of waiting 2-3 minutes for my blog to fully load in a browser. – easy sign up
– easy to create a cloud based on a single feed or url
– easy to create a cloud based on a group of feeds
– import an opml file for easy creation of a massive cloud
– good for publishing clouds on websites
– dedicated URLs for each cloud, in html and xml format
– show any number of tags in the cloud, up to 250 As Pietro writes, a tag set or tagcloud for a single source of information is not very interesting. For instance, here is the tagcloud for Techcrunch only:
(long load time) Compare this to the tagcloud for our entire opml file, with over 200 feeds of awesome blogs and other content (see list ):
(long load time) It is a much more interesting result set. Remember, clicking on any tag gives a result set. Here is part of the result set after clicking on the “search” tag above: Tagcloud uses Yahoo’s and simple php to put the feed information into a database, analyze it with the Yahoo tool and generate the cloud:
Given their openness to creation of new applications using tagcloud, this can be an exciting and very useful service over time. Hint: If aggregators generated a tag cloud for all of my unread content every day, it would be much easier for me to peruse posts that I am interested in. This can solve the overload problem we are all facing as we try to track more and more feeds daily (reading over 200 daily feeds takes me at least 2-3 hours per day right now). What I would like to see is a tag cloud based on tags keywords. John Herren (his original experiment )
Pietro speroni on tagclouds theory in general: (doesn’t fully apply because PS is based on tagging, not keywords) (good bibliography), ,
|
Profile: Google Earth
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 2 |
??? Well, it’s going to be a cool tool that “combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.” However, the download is delayed, so we can’t test it yet. The certainly looks cool though. When its live, we’ll profile it.
|
Profile – Shadows
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 18 |
Two weeks ago Austin, TX (this is a company) . Last week they released version 2.0 of their Firefox extension (see our ), which we are still drooling over (it’s ). Two weeks ago they very quietly launched Shadows, which is a social bookmarking site. Our understanding from Dave Panos, their CEO, and Andrew Busey, the co-founder, is that they will be publicly announcing Shadows this week at AlwaysOn in Stanford. As we mentioned with , Shadows should be compared to other social bookmarking sites like , , , . Shadows has a single drawback: they absolutely require an IE or firefox toolbar installation in order to bookmark pages on the fly. This takes up valuable screen real estate and is generally annoying. However, the functionality more than makes up for the real estate loss – this is a toolbar we are going to , and there’s a good reason. Not only does the toolbar allow saving and tagging of pages, but it also allows you to view a “shadow page” of the current URI. The shadow page shows tags added by users, comments and other meta-data, which is very useful. Here is content from the shadow page for Techcrunch (which is somewhat biased since as of now we are the only user to have added meta-data for Techcrunch:-)):
Shadows seems to have all of the high end functionality of the other social bookmarking services (with the exception of a server cache of the site?). One thing we haven’t figured out – there is an ability to add friends but we don’t know what functionality comes with adding friends since users set bookmars as either public or private. We like the delicious and furl-like popup up when bookmarking a page: They also have shadow pages, as mentioned above, and a nifty feature called “ “, which are pre-defined tags like experts, cool, etc., many of which we have attributed to TechCrunch, of course. Overall, Shadows is very cool and we look forward to the official launch. Dave Panos – Chief Executive Officer (co-founder)
Andrew Busey – Executive Vice President (co-founder)
Austin Ventures
Mayfield
, , ,
|
Profile – Zazzle
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 20 |
1999 (zazzle.com launched 2003)
Announced on July 18, 2005 Zazzle let’s customers create customized products, ranging from tshirts to stamps, and sell them on the zazzle website. In their own words, is a relatively straightforward process of choosing prodcuts (apparel, posters, stamps, etc.), uploading images, and pricing the items. Zazzle claims that they have “over 500,000 totally unique, user-created products, available in billions of variations”. is really interesting. Within certain parameters, users can upload their own images, or use stock zazzle images (like disney images), and create actual postage stamps. A sheet of 20 first-class stamps will sell for $16.99, 130% more than “normal” stamps. Zazzle Stamps is possible via a . FYI, has a similar program and will be partnering with , a zazzle competitor. , , , , , , , , , , , ,
|
Profile – Loomia
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 27 |
June, 2005 San Francisco Loomia provides search, recommendations, and personalization for podcasts, videocasts, and other syndicated media. In a nutshell, their goal is to help you find content that you will enjoy based on how you rate content you’ve already absorbed. The idea is awesome, and their approach is perfect (centralized website, plus distributed services to content providers) . As with most successful web 2.0 companies, they are leveraging their users to create their core value. Users rate content. Loomia compares a user’s ratings and recommends other content that they should also enjoy. For instance, if I like (which I do), and if other people who like Podtech also like (an company), Loomia will recommend that I also check out Earningscast. Netflix takes a similar approach to recommending movies. My experience as the CEO of Zip.ca (a movie renting company in Canada) with similar recommendation features proved to me how powerful these recommendations can be. It is a hugely powerful way of connecting like minded people to like minded content. Loomia isn’t planning on keeping all of this data to themselves. A core part of their business model will be working with other companies (think odeo as well as podtech) to allow those services to add ratings, recommendations and other features. If Loomia gets in the middle of this data stream, they could have a very bright future ahead of them. Loomia is just getting started and the site reflects this. However, they have an awesome team (see below) and the core feature set is there. I recommend you give it a try. Mark, Loomia’s CEO, has promised to let me know when new features are added, and we will update their profile here at TechCrunch. David Marks, Co-Founder and CEO
Francis Kelly, Co-Founder and Director of Technology
Ken Fromm, Co-Founder, CFO and Director of Business Services , , ,
|
Profile – Simpy
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 18 |
Simpy is a social bookmarking service that can be compared to , . In their own words,
Simpy has an excellent user interface and interesting features that the competitors haven’t added. Cool features include full text search of pages (Furl has this as well) and also the ability to find broken links and fix them. We also like the ability to have private, searchable, taggable free text notes on any page. Any bookmark can also be made private. Finally, the ability to add a on your blog or other web page (to search your tags) is great. – Save and Tag pages with a single click using the Simpy Bookmarklet
– Full-text Search bookmarked pages’ content, not just meta-data
– Attach searchable notes to bookmarks
– Choose between private or public bookmarks
– Find people like you and subscribe to their bookmarks
– Share your bookmarks with others
– Detect broken, forgotten and even redirected bookmarks
– Upload your existing bookmarks (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Galeon and Konqueror supported)
– Export your bookmarks
– Access your bookmarks from any browser and multiple computers
– Save private, taggable, and searchable free-text Notes
– For hackers: Simpy has an open REST API – use it!
– For bloggers: Publish your bookmarks in your blog using RSS or ATOM We’ve spoken with Otis Gospodnetić by email over the last couple of weeks and have been told that . We look forward to seeing what’s coming! In general, we find Simpy’s user interface and search capabilities superior to del.icio.us and Furl. We like the interface for adding bookmarks, and ask only that pages can be bookmarked via a popup like del.icio.us (as an option). The optional additional metadata fields are really useful. Otis Gospodnetić , , , , , , , .
|
Profile – SpringDoo
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 27 |
Today in the US (previsously New Zealand only) Springdoo is an easy to use service where you call a toll free phone number, record a message, and then can have the message sent via email to your contacts. The email contains a link to the springdoo site, where the message is automatically played – it is not sent as a file attachment. The service is not free, but you get 10 minutes free by signing up. The service charges a minimum of one minute, and in 20 second intervals after the first minute. The charge applies to the length of the message recorded, so if you send a one minute message to 20 people only one minute is charged. It is currently available in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US. Here’s How it works: You call the phone number (your caller id must be on), record a message, select emails to send it to (up to 20) and send. The recipients receive an email, click on the link and listen to the message. A sample message can be heard . We’ve . Yes, “Su Su” is much hotter than me and has a cool New Zealand accent. :-) Jason Kerr, CEO , ,
|
Profile – Digg 2.0
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 11 |
Digg 2.0 Launched: 5 hours ago (July 10, 2005) See our on Digg for a description of its functionality. Its a very useful news site that leverages user submissions and “diggs” of stories to promote content higher in various categories and the home page. Digg released version 2.0 a few hours ago. New look and feel and expanded functionality. In their own words, One nice feature we’ve noticed is the ability to add Digg stories to your own homepage – cool widget.
(great post) (note Jake’s )
|
Profile – Planet Web 2.0
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 11 |
about two weeks ago Planet Web 2.0 is a website (and more importantly an RSS feed) that aggregates content from web 2.0 publishers around the web. It’s a must add feed for anyone tracking web 2.0. The sources of the content are linked on the sidebar, and include TechCrunch. :-) We first discovered the site while reading Richard MacManus’ excellent and much discussed post “ ” last week. We have lots of thoughts on Richard’s post (and generally, entirely agree with him). Our feeling is Planet Web 2.0, which goes out of its way to attribute content, is going about this inevitable evolution in the right way, and we support them. The debate on the issue of re-publishing content goes back as far as the web itself. RSS makes it even easier, of course. In fact, the entire purpose of RSS is the republishing of content. The debate centers on whether it should be republished only in RSS readers, or if it can be republished anywhere. In reality, though, what is the difference between an online RSS reader and a website? Not much, particuarly when you think about how bloglines and other readers allow sharing of feeds… So here’s TechCrunch’s position: We like Planet Web 2.0 and think what is doing is a responsible way to promote content, while giving proper attribution to those who wrote it. In forming our position, we noted Ian Davis’s (the creator of Planet Web 2.0) comments on Richard’s post:
As long as this his position, and his actions reflect his position, we’re behind him all the way. On a related note, (another must read blog) created two aggregate feeds recently – the and the . He does less attribution than Planet Web 2.0, but it’s clear that his motives are pure. We recommend both.
I spoke with Ian Davis by email and he provided the following insights on his site: I’ve had a long-standing interest in open access to data, collaboration
and the semantic web. I was involved in authoring the RSS 1.0
specification back in 2000 and at the time I saw this as the first step
to an open network of data with RSS giving implied permission for reuse.
Now, with Web 2.0, I think I have an exciting opportunity to apply the
same principles to a much wider range of content and services. In fact,
I’ve just started a new role at a British company called Talis leading
development of the Silkworm project, a platform for enabling Web 2.0
applications. I’m having a lot of fun. It feels like I’ve just discovered Mosaic for
the first time :)” There have been a couple of posts that are related to the subject of content stealing/aggregation. This is by Fred Wilson and he calls it the “internet Access of Evil” and he quotes a Jason Calcanis email. The second is by , who noticed the same site stole his content. There is a line here, and some people choose to cross it. Really bad form.
|
Profile – IceRocket
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 29 |
(Soon to be renamed ) Dallas, Texas IceRocket is a blog search engine, and a damn good one, owned by Mark Cuban. In our opinion they aren’t quite ready to take on the yet, but they are feature rich and doing some things very, very well. There are two ways that people are comparing blog search engines today: total links for a given keyword or tag, and total links shown for a given blog. On both tests, IceRocket seems to be doing well (but ). On the links into TechCrunch, IceRocket seems to be far and away the most up-to-date, (things change rapidly in the real-time-web). IceRocket has a ton of great search and other tools, including search by , (see their tag cloud ) and . They also have a service (see pre-defined trend competitions ), and hell, they even have (when I was COO of GNR in London I sold one of our companies, NamePlanet, to , another Mark Cuban company which powers this). Finally, they also have a , which is awesome if you aren’t like me and still have enough browser real estate left to actually view web pages. Basically, IceRocket is awesome. One area where they really shine is in search results. A result includes tons of useful links. In addition to a link to the source, there are also links to tags for the result, the blog itself, tools to refine the search to include or exclude that blog, number of links to the blog (for relevance and ego), and they even link to the RSS feed for the blog. All search results pages have RSS feeds. Another fun tool is , which shows a rolling list of incoming search terms (all linked). This reminds me of the flat screen in Google’s offices that shows incoming searches (although Google appears to filter out adult terms while IceRocket happily does not :-) ). They are changing their blog search engine name to BlogScour sometime in the near future. We’ve also seen an by bloggers to tag their posts with IceRocket tags in addition to Technorati Tags.
Blake Rhodes, CEO , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
|
Web 2.0 This Week (July 10 – 16)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 16 |
The main Web 2.0 news this week focused on Technorati (is it dyin or is it rockin?) and the release of Atom 1.0. Lots of other random and interesting stuff as well, including important chia-pet news.
has dominated web 2.0 news this week. Posts come at it from three different but related angles: – . See no. 5 from . Richard MacManus again noted Technorati’s ascension in a post this week called “ “, and cited a recent article on them that barely mentioned that they have any competition. Richard writes – . See Jason’s cry for Google and Yahoo to launch blog search engines and follow up . See Blog Herald’s counter-point . – . Doc Searls gives a massive overview . More Points of View:
, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
From , See also: , and .
He mentioned this in a Gillmor gang podcast too. I totally agree. I’ve shown many people how to use RSS. They are all religous about it now. David Beisel comments . In a to a Fred Wilson post. Via . Catalyst released a report at the link above that basically says people don’t get blogging and RSS yet, and we have a long way to go to get there. It’s just us geeks and wannabe geeks for now. See also , and .
Our understanding is that 2 players in China have about 80% of the market. via .
There’s been a ton written about this over the last week. Basically, Yahoo’s HotJobs is now scraping job sites for job listings and adding them to it’s paid listings. It had to – it’s being squeezed by the paid guys (see Monster.com) and the new scrapers like Indeed. What we’d really like to see is companies set up their jobs page with an RSS feed. Seems obvious and would avoid all this scraping nonsense. See , , , , .
:-) Via .
|
Profile – Pluck (For Firefox)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 16 |
(For Firefox) June 13, 2005 (2.0 Beta for Firefox) has a number of excellent products, including a that competes with Bloglines, NewsGator and others (see our ) as well as an that is very popular. They’ve also quietly launched a social bookmarking site called that will have increased functionality added next week. Pluck has been testing a plugin for Firefox for a couple of months, and released the on Wednesday. It has been very well received (over 3,000 downloads so far). It’s this product, the Firefox 2.0 beta, that is being profiled here. Its awesome because it is and than any aggregator I’ve seen. It also seems to update feeds quite fast. I will switch to permanently this from Bloglines as soon as the updated features are launched. This is a Firefox extension, so the download is quick and, unlike their IE plugin, most of the work is done at the server level. The product is therefore much more like their “web edition” than “Pluck for IE”. Importing feeds via OPML was a snap. I was able to quickly organize them into folders and generally get set up. I spoke with Matthew Bookspan at Pluck about the product yesterday (Pluck was also nice enough to offer for us to be a beta tester a month ago but we failed miserably in following up). See Matt’s blog post on the release of the product . Matt assures us that those few features that we found lacking are on the bug/feature list to be added soon.
– Syncronizes feeds automatically accross all Pluck Products
– easy feed import via OPML
– works well with tabbed browsing (open feeds in tabs)
– publish/share folders
– bolds feeds with new content
– choices on RSS feed updates
– seems to run very, very fast
– easy to save posts/clippings
– notification of feed updates – a little toast window above the pluck icon in the status bar: – show number of subscribers per feed
– show number of unread items within a feed
– check all as “read”
– syncing of read/unread accross Pluck Products (one of the biggest problems in the industry right now) Additional Screen Shots: Dave Panos – Chief Executive Officer (co-founder)
Andrew Busey – Executive Vice President (co-founder)
Austin Ventures
Mayfield
, , , , ,
|
Update – Simpy (New Features)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 28 |
Simpy is a social bookmarking service that can be compared to , , , . Simpy released new features today, including – full text search of bookmarked sites
– a tag cloud of your bookmarks
– remove, rename, split, and merge tags From Otis on the : The most notable features concern searching and tagging. The full-text search is back! Not only can you full-text search your own bookmarks, but you can also full-text search any other Simpy user’s public bookmarks. In my opinion, this is big and useful. Browsing by tags is nice, but is also limiting. Full-text search can do more, and since Simpy supports fielded search, you can always emulate tag search with queries like tags:foo (more info is in the FAQ). You can see your Tag Cloud now (just use the “tags” link in the nav bar at the top of Simpy pages). A Tag Cloud is a more visual representation of your tags and their usage distribution. Along with the Tag Cloud come the 4 new Tag functions: remove, rename, split, and merge. These 4 functions will let you mess with your tags to your heart’s content. If they are not enough, I’m all ears.” Release Notes are . These are useful additional features. I really like seeing data in a tag cloud format for some reason – I’d love it if the RSS aggregators showed new unread content in this format – it would make it much easier to quickly get to the content I want to read. I also have to say that I was blown away by the “Shadow Page” idea – simple yet very, very useful, and I would like to see simpy and others consider this idea.
|
Profile – BlogPulse
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 28 |
Cincinnati, OH BlogPulse is an exemplary real-time search engine, with additional features like trends, conversation tracker and blog profiles. It’s parent company is . In their own words, The BlogPulse site offers four main services that we profile here: Search, Conversation Tracker, Trends and Profiles. BlogPulse search allows search by keyword or URI ( ). Advanced search features are . Sample searches yielded excellent results compared to Technorati, Feedster and others, although this is a quickly evolving space. In general, the index looks very up to date and complete, and searches are very fast. The service is really cool. As the blogosphere has evolved, “conversations” are taking place in a decentralized and distributed manner over literally millions of blogs and other websites (whereas in web 1.0 conversations were generally centralized on a site, such as a newsgroup). Type your search terms in the boxes on the left. Type descriptive labels for each search into the boxes on the right. Then choose your time frame: 1, 2, 3 or 6 months.�? Blogpulse has collected the full text of blog posts and analyzes citations to create a visual conversation tracker on a keyword or URI. It’s rough, but extremely useful for tracking discussions. See the videos and for further explanation. A key value of Conversation Tracker is to track viral diffusion associated with an individual post. The service gives a visual graph of postings associated with keywords or URIs. You can also compare multiple items on a single graph. They also have for high profile news and other discussions. Below are two trend graphs. The first is for the keyword “TechCrunch”, the second compares postings of Harry Potter to Willy Wonka. The has fairly deep information about specific blogs, including overview, posts, citations, trends, sources, neighborhood. Check it out. Blogpulse also has lots of other cool and interesting links, stats, etc. that we are not profiling here. Mahendra Vora – Executive Chairman of the Board
Mike Nazzaro – Chief Executive Officer
Sundar Kadayam – Chief Technology Officer
Pete Blackshaw – Chief Marketing Officer
Jay Stockwell – Senior VP Sales
Karthik Iyer – Senior VP Business Development
Chris Connaughton – Vice President of Technology
Douglas Widmann – Vice President & General Counsel
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
|
Profile – CommonTimes
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 28 |
July 13, 2005 CommonTimes is a social bookmarking site for news. Stories are bookmarked by users from around the web, and tagged. The level of prominence is determined by the number of users who have tagged the news source. In their own words, If you imagine the mainstream media exists at one extreme of top-down content control where a small group of editors determine what appears in the News, CommonTimes is exactly the opposite – a bottom up news site at which grassroots Web readers determine the top stories by bookmarking them as they browse. Comparatively, CommonTimes is to news what Del.icio.us and Yahoo’s MyWeb are to Internet bookmarks. Contrary to Google News, a closed, automated system limited to mainstream media stories, CommonTimes is an open community system that accepts content from any news site or blog – and is entirely driven by our readers. For example, while Slashdot and Grist Magazine provide a tightly controlled top-down filter of technology and environmental news that only rarely makes the mainstream media, our sections provide a bottom-up view of stories our readers feel are important from any source which may well integrate stories from the latter. News it what our community decides is news.”
There are web 2.0 elements: social bookmarking, publisher and user tagging, comments to bookmarked stories, and RSS feeds for everything. It’s an interesting experiment and we look forward to participating. There are also easy-to-use tools for bookmarking sites, including tips on how to . For an in depth overview, see , who writes a fantastic blog (and who tipped us off to the service). Jeff Reifman
Garrett Moon
Kristine Washburn
Boe Miller
Brian Del Vecchio
,
|
Profile – Doostang
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 17 |
Doostang, Inc.
160 Brannan St. Suite 306
San Francisco, CA 94107 E-mail: [email protected] Recently Doostang is a trust network and employment service. Once you have joined, you can post a profile, upload a resume, post and search for jobs, write testimonials and invite other people. You can join by invitation only. If you would like an invitation, email us (see our about section) and we will be happy to send you one. In their own words, Over 50% of recruiting today is done through the personal network of contacts and a large portion of which is done by email communication. Using your personal network is the most effective way to find the right candidate for a position and to find the perfect job. It eliminates the need to either post a job to an irrelevant audience or to search through the multitude of jobs available on the Internet or newspapers that would be of no interest to you. Doostang provides the infrastructure to connect personal networks together and to create a natural quality filter for recruiting and job searching. Doostang hails from two Farsi words, “doost” which means friend, and “tang” a word used to symbolize the trust between a close group of people. Farsi, one of the world’s oldest languages dating back to 600BC, was spoken from the borders of India in the far east and Russia and China in the north, to southern shores of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean in the west. The word Doostang fittingly describes our company’s long term goal to be the trusted professional network.” The site works in similar ways to , in that you choose your trust network (friends), can interact with them, post testimonials, etc. There are two important differences. The first difference is that you can only become a member via an invitation. That does create an atmosphere of exclusivity. The second difference is that the jobs seem to be very high quality. Nivi mentioned this in a comment conversation we were having in his about Doostang and I have to say I agree with him – the quality level is at this time very high. We like Doostang and will continue to build our network at the site. Mareza Larizadeh
Pavel Krapivin
, ,
|
Profile – Del.icio.us (new feature)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 10 |
(new feature) Josh Schachter (the creator of del.icio.us) new “tags for two” functionality yesterday. It allows direct bookmarket notification to a person, to suggest they see specific content. We first noticed a trend towards people using del.icio.us as a recommendation engine about a month ago. Fred Wilson, in addition to being THE web2.0 venture capitalist, loves music and posts regularly on music he is listening to. On June 4, 2005 he a request to his readers to recommend new music to him via del.icio.us:
Then you take the RSS feed for that delicious tag, in my case http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/fred’spodcast, and burn that as a Feedburner feed.” We noticed it, and sort of put it in the back of our mind filed under “another cool del.icio.us tool”. Fred also set up a del.icio.us tag for his wife, Joanne. Whenever he wants her to see something on the web, he tags it “for:gothamgal”. Brad Feld noticed this, and liked it, and posted that he set up something similar for himself – All of this got Josh Schachter’s attention and so he created a more structured, and private, way of doing this: We’ve just begun rolling out support for tagging items for others. To do so, use “for:username” where username is the name of the user you want to send the item to. You can see items tagged for you at http://del.icio.us/for/ (it’ll redirect to your own page, which other users will not be able to see.)”
Brad Feld then posted an update to his original request . So, bottom line, any delicious user can now have a private recommendation tag. To recommend stuff to me, tag it “for:marrington” and I will be able to view it at ” http://del.icio.us/for/marrington” (although this will not be public). It’s a nice feature, although I would like an option to make it public. I think it would be interesting to share these recommendations with everyone. There are also about spamming incentives. Over time, I can see “blacklists” being created for “bad users”, although it would be easy for people to simply create new delicious accounts.
Brad Feld ( ) ( )
|
Update: AlwaysOn (Day One)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 19 |
Great start to the conference. Cocktail hour(s) followed by a number of panels and discussions. This is clearly going to be a great event – a live webcast is available , with over 900 reported participants. The chat is lively and interesting. Tom Byers, Stanford Professor, talks about the . Interesting Presentation by Peter Hirshberg and Michael Markman discussing the fear of technology in the mid-last century, followed by more hopefullness, and eventually coming full circle to people’s concerns about today’s “global villiage” and how everyone is involved in everyone else’s life. Best quote is the shoeshine guy – . Wonderful segment. Totally awesome.
Announced by Packy Kelly and Susan Ayers-Walker Looking for a link of the winners. Bill Draper accepted Skype award for overall top innovator and top consumer technology company. Sandy Berger, Michael Medved and Jerry Brown Not much to say here (there is no way I’m getting into politics on this blog), although I enjoyed hearing Jerry being introduced as the Mayor of California. :-) It was also fun to watch the live chat up on screen next to the participants. More tomorrow.
|
Update: AlwaysOn (Day Two)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 21 |
, Day Two at Always On was hectic. There are two channels here – the main room with panel discussions (see schedule below) and a side room with 5 minute CEO pitches. CEO’s were judged on three areas of their presentations: Opportunity, Go to market strategy and Overall Presentation. Both channels were interesting, and attendees were charging back and forth between rooms all day (us included).
We saw about half of the CEO pitches. Most interesting/entertaining in our opinion included (Dave Panos), Rearden Commerce (Patrick Grady), LiveDeal (Rajesh Navar) and Realm (Rick White). We also noticed interviewing many CEOs as they finished their pitch. We are looking forward to hearing the podcasts soon. Here’s a picture of John with Dave Panos and Andrew Busey, co-founders of (TechCrunch ): Main Panels: I thought the (great picture from JD Lasica) fireside chat and follow up panel discussion were the best events of the day. If you are interested in hearing John Furrier’s interview with Mark, see . My notes from the Mark Cuban fireside chat: IceRocket is being renamed blogscour.com. It looks like they are really focusing on prospective search. Mark discussed the differences in the way people search – some people want relevant information, some people want timely information. Google is good at “relevant”, but not timely. Blogscour will focus on timely. Mark quote: Allen Delattre, the moderator, said . That’s the first time I’ve heard it put that way. It’s certainly true (but see yesterday – When will blogging peak?) In the next segment, Mark spoke at length about delivering movies via dvd and in cinemas (and eventually online) all on the same day. This is definitely the future. Mark said he’s learned the most about marketing from four people: Bill Gates, Paris Hilton, Dennis Rodman and Michael Dell. Mark is a good guy and an interesting guy and it was cool having him at the event yesterday. Looking forward to Marc Canter’s discussion today. , , ,
|
AlwaysOn Starts Today
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 19 |
We’ll be attending the AlwaysOn Conference this week. The buzz is incredible and we look forward to seeing and writing about . Updates to come. There’s a profile of AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins in (via ).
|
Profile – Google RSS Reader
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 26 |
July 25, 2005 Google has added RSS and bookmark functionality to its personalized home page. Bookmark functionality is very basic – it adds a link (with an optional title) to your Google home page. It will be more interesting if they add delicious or shadows-like functionality. The RSS functionality works very much like Yahoo’s home page RSS reader, with cool options like setting the number of posts shown (up to 9), and the ability to drag and drop the feeds anywhere on the screen. It’s great for RSS newbies or if you have only a few feeds that you review daily. , , , , , ,
|
Profile – ElfURL
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 21 |
July 20, 2005 . I was reading Alexander Muse’s blog this morning and saw his on ElfURL: I decided that the elves at Weblogs Work should be able to create such a tool and assigned them the task. We decided to call the Web 2.0 application elfURL. The tool is almost complete (the tagging function is not complete and the RSS feed might not be working perfectly). This is what is new about the Web 2.0 – idea to application within four days.” I have been a user of for a long time. It’s a neat tool to shorten long URLs into short ones. Alexander’s thought was to take that basic idea behind TinyURL and add some web 2.0 flavor – tagging, stats and RSS. Now, you can (or soon will be able to – the functionality isn’t working yet) add tags to your short URLs, see the number of times the URL was used, and subscribe to the stats via RSS. Cool. As an example of how the stats work, click to see how many visitors we’ve sent to the site from this post (we converted their URL into an ) They’ve also provided a that you can add to a website and include the ElfURL functionality: , , , , , (awesome blog with a great name), .
|
Profile – Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 26 |
(now ) By Yahoo, announced July 25, 2005
Konfabulator was yesterday. In their own words, Konfabulator was originally launched on February 10, 2003, for Mac only. A Windows version launched in November 2004. Konfabulator required a download and works on both the Mac and Windows platforms. The Mac download is 5.4 mb, and the Windows download is 10 mb. The service previously required a fee but is now free. Set up was quick and very easy after the download. Basically, it runs small applications on your desktop (there are to choose from). I like the calculator, sticky notes and RSS reader the best (although I cannot figure out how to configure the RSS reader to stop showing USA Today, and gave up). There are also widgets for weather, batter power, and just about everything else you can think of. A few are automatically downloaded with the installation, but they are easily removed and others are easily added simply by downloading them (they install into the correct directory automatically). Widgets can easily be moved around the desktop, customized, and delted entirely. There are to allow anyone to easily create their own widgets as well. Konfabulator looks and feels very similar to Dashboard on OSX for the Mac, although some people claim creating widgets is easier on Konfabulator. Overall, it’s cool but it will be uninstalled by the end of the evening. I noticed serious system slowdown after installation. Arlo Rose
Perry Clarke
Ed Voas
, , , , , , , , (long and excellent overview and discussion), , , , ,
|
7/7/2005
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 7 |
(via ) I was on a plane to Copenhagen when it happened, terrifically happy that I had wifi and blogging away about this and that, when the IMs started coming in from friends in London. Passengers and crew came by to get updates as the flight terminated. Thankfully my friends all seem to be ok, and are now taking very long walks home as the entire London transportation system has shut down. There are lots of news sources on this, but here are a few to review as things develop:
|
Profile – Google Earth (relaunch)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 7 |
Just re-launched Google Earth combines satellite imagery, aerial photos, maps and Google Search create an interesting application that allows you to view just about anywhere on the planet in at least some level of detail. It is only available on the PC platform for now. In their own words, The idea is simple. The technology combines Keyhole (an ) with other Google data and tools. The visual impact is . Well, lots of things. The first thing we did (and probably everyone else does) was to try and find an image of our home. Here’s where I live, in Manhattan Beach, California (its there in the middle on the beach, I swear): They showcase some really beautiful shots of famous places as well ( ). Here’s the Grand Canyon, for instance: – Fly from space to your neighborhood. Type in an address and zoom right in.
– Search for schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. Get driving directions.
– Tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings.
– Save and share your searches and favorites. Even add your own annotations.
The experience of changing from one location to another is fascinating. The application zooms out from your current location and moves along the globe to the new location, and then zooms in. You can move the screen location around with the mouse (just like google maps). There is a 10 mb download. – Operating system: Windows 2000, Windows XP
– CPU speed: Intel® Pentium® PIII 500 MHz
– System memory (RAM): 128MB
– 200MB hard-disk space
– 3D graphics card: 3D-capable video card with 16MB VRAM
– 1024×768, 32-bit true color screen
– Network speed: 128 kbps (“Broadband/Cable Internet”)
There are three – Free, Plus and Pro. Comparison chart:
( )
(Tour de France)
|
Profile – Gigablast (Blog Search)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 9 |
Recently Gigablast just launched a beta blog search engine at blogs.gigablast.com. Results can be viewed by “revelvance” or date. There are other options as well. However, there is no “tag” search.
Matt Wells, CEO ( ) Links:
|
Profile: RocketBoom
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 9 |
RocketBoom New York, NY RocketBoom is a very popular Monday through Friday videoblog, or vblog. The segments are short – around 3 -5 minutes (or less) and released weekdays at 9 am EST. RocketBoom is extremely low-budget – ( ). In their own words, RocketBoom anchorwoman Amanda Congdon is the star of the show. She’s an aspiring actress who the Associated Press says first appeared on NBC’s The Restaurant as a disgruntled coat-check girl. For an example of one of the “posts”, see (Topics: nasa tempe1 smashes into comet, rocketboom fireworks, itunes rss video tutorial, akimbo, akimbo review, karl rove leaks c.i.a. names, google video hacked on first day, google distributes pirated videos, skater trainer, music: [1, 2], apple itunes). , on Tom Cruise ( ) The site has multiple RSS feeds and currently has approximately 25,000 daily downloads. Check it out. It’s one of our regular RSS feeds now.
, creator
, anchorwoman
, regular advisor
, Video editor
|
Profile – Talk Digger
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 31 |
TalkDigger queries major blog (and other) search engines on a given URL and returns total number of links in to the site as well as other data. Clicking on the total link number takes you to the selected search engine results. 1. Result. This is the number of links to that URL. If you click on that blue number, you will be redirected to the result page of the search engine and be able to know who links to you
2. Trend. This is an arrow that will shows you if the number of results for that search is higher, lower or the same as the previous one. This is really effective when you wake up the morning and that you need to instantly see if someone as talked about your blog during the night
3. 7 last digs trend graph. This is a graph that shows you the evolution of the results returned by the search engines in the last 7 search requests”
It’s a useful tool for doing ego searches as well as for generally comparing the search sites on total number of links in their respective indexes for any given query. Nice tool. (via , and ) , (bookmarklet), , , , , , , , ,
|
Profile – BlinkList
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 31 |
(a company) June 2005. Major feature release :
Mike Reining (Director)
MindValley LC
236 W. Rincon Ave #B
Campbell, California,
95008 USA
Tel: (650) 387 0920 :
Vishen Lakhiani (Director)
MindValley LC
Fabrikus Building
No.1, Jln 8-91,
Taman Shamelin Perkasa, Cheras, 56100
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Tel: (+603) 9283 6054 BlinkList is a social bookmarking service built on ajax. It is very buttoned up and has some excellent features. It also has an all-star team with deep experience, led by their PR star (see team below) :-). We’ve profiled a number of competing services lately – see , , , , . Blinklist includes most of the features from those sites, and adds a couple of others.
– easy bookmarking, including a if you want to have one-click bookmarks
– adding “stars” to tags and bookmarks to easily find them in the future – Blinklist will take any highlighted text on the screen and auto fill a description field with the text (this is the only service I know of that does this, and it’s incredibly useful) – bookmarks can be private or public. You can email bookmarks to friends at the time of making them, which is also a very useful feature. TechCrunch bookmarks are .
– permanent tag pages – see for example (a nested/filtered search function on general tag search would be an awesome addition – has a “narrow results” option that is very useful)
– a tag cloud for each user, as well as the entire blinklist community – “related tags” for currently viewed tags
– “auto-complete” suggestions when tagging a bookmark
– RSS for all pages
– easy signup see the demo to see some of these features being used. Overall, BlinkList is a worthy addition to the ranks of social bookmarking services, and one of our favorites. It doesn’t have the user base of del.cio.us, or all of the functionality of Shadows or Simpy, but it does have unique features that none of the others have. It could very easily get traction. – full page caching with keyword search
– shadow-page type functionality (this is going to really help with search engine rankings for Pluck, and it’s cool).
– nested/tag filtering at all levels
– show number of people who’ve bookmared a given URI Vishen M. Lakhiani – Co-Founder
Michael Reining – Co-Founder
Kristina Mand – Book Balancer
Adelle Magsombol – Business Development Manager
Jiangti Wan Leong – Chief Web Developer
Hannu Nikupeteri – Database Engineer
Anita Patwardhan – Web Analytics and eCommerce Consultant
Amar H. Hamzeh – Code Wiz
Ozzy Labradoodle – Director of Public Relations ( ) , , , , , , , , , , ,
|
Update – IceRocket (name change)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 31 |
We wrote in our on IceRocket that they were changing their name to BlogScour (based on something Mark Cuban said at AlwaysOn). Blake Rhodes, IceRocket’s CEO, called to tell me that our facts were not quite right (he also thanked us for the post). They are not going to change their name to BlogScour, but they going to launch a site called BlogScour that will contain all of their blog search capabilities. I saw this at a few minutes ago (I cannot locate the mentioned SEW article), and emailed Blake to confirm the facts. He confirmed what he told me on Friday – We WILL launch a site called Blogscour.com. I dont have a date for that. Basically it will be our blog search we currently have minus all the web and image search features we have on IceRocket currently. It is going to be blogs only. Have a great evening. Blake” So there you have it. Personally, I don’t give a damn, I just love their search engine. They could call it searchcrap.com and we’d still use it twenty times a day to research companies.
|
Profile – Gmail Drive
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 31 |
v. 1.0.6 was released on July 27, 2005 Gmail drive is a service that creates a virtual hard drive folder on your Windows system, accessible through “My Computer”, that allows you to store files in your Gmail email account. The current Gmail storage limitation is 2 gigs. In their own words, GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google Gmail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your Gmail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag’n’drop files to. Ever since Google started to offer users a Gmail e-mail account, which includes storage space of 2000 megabytes, you have had plenty of storage space but not a lot to fill it up with. With GMail Drive you can easily copy files to your Gmail account and retrieve them again.
When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the Gmail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures. But basically GMail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer.
You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive folder simply by using drag’n’drop like you’re used to with the normal Explorer folders.”
The service works as promised. After a quick download and installation, it installs a virtual gmail hard drive on your system, accessible through “My Computer”. You can then drag and drop files into the drive. I tested out dragging and dropping files, and it worked well (if understandably a little slow – a 1.5 mb file took about 20 seconds to fully copy over. Individual files cannot be bigger than 10 mb or have file names longer than 40 characters (gmail limitations). We’ll also be profiling , a similar service that is web-based, and so platform independent. (via ) , , , (we the .name domain name), , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
|
Web 2.0 This Week (July 3 – 9)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 8 |
This week we saw a number of interesting web 2.0 developments. Far outstripping everything else, however, was the terrorist attack on London on July 7. Blogs and the Internet played a big role in getting information out to people, as television lagged way behind and the cell networks were jammed.
I was flying to Europe for a conference, enjoying my first-ever wifi experience on a plane, when the IMs from friends in London started coming in. “There was an exposion in the tube, they think it was a power converter” one friend said. Then, a few minutes later, “Oh my God, there are reports of explosions everywhere – it may be bus bombs.” Soon I had flight attendants and other flyers coming up to me for updates. The pilot sent a flight attendant back to hear what was happening because she couldn’t get news via radio. I was the only news source on the flight, it seemed. BBC’s website went down from the traffic, and people turned to blogs for the news. was cited as the most up to date source of information. blogged about their experiences. From a big media v. blog angle, Fred Wilson summed it up perfectly when he said (linking to ). Our heart to everyone affected. I was in Manhattan on 9/11. It takes a few days for reality to set in. Blogherald cited the , which showed the largest-ever month-over-month growth in June 2005 domain names. One of the reasons included “The explosive growth of weblogs, a growing number of which are purchasing domains for branding purposes.” However, . Also See for an interesting article on the growth of trackback spam. Ian writes a wonderful essay, furthering the definition of web 2.0: Overview of top 20 RSS readers: RSS adoption is growing rapidly as a result. Because RSS is, well, really simple, everybody and his brother seems to have written an RSS reader (also called an aggregator) and is vying for your attention.” Click the link to see the results. Hint – Bloglines isn’t no. 1. A brief but thoughtful overview of what’s good and not so good about tagging. Check out . Steve is the first to notice a quiet blog search engine launched by Yahoo, which was later pulled off the net. See also , , and .
Also see on this.
|
Web 2.0 This Week (July 24 – 30)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 30 |
It’s been a fun-filled Web 2.0 week, capped off with today. Good stuff below. The BlogHer Conference ’05 is today, at Techmart in Santa Clara. BlogHer Conference ’05 will provide an open, inclusive forum to: 1. Discuss the role of women within the larger blog community
2. Examine the developing (and debatable) code of blogging ethics
3. Discover how blogging is shrinking the world and amplifying the voices of women worldwide” We fully support the goals of and are about the buzz the conference is creating. Blogging conferences tend to have lots of blogging coverage, and there are some excellent posts coming out of today’s event. There’s literally a ton of important stuff to read and think about. And unlike BeautifulPeople (see no. 10 below), we as men are actually welcome at this event. :-) And all kidding aside, if you only read one link, read Julie Leung’s “ ” I had the opportunity to see Julie speak at Gnomedex last month and was captivated by her ability to tell a story that contains a meaningful message. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Pheedo (soon to be profiled) released very interesting stats on RSS usage this week. Key stats and information: (hmm, maybe I should move these weekly wrapups to Tuesday…)
, , , The first in a six-part series. Worth the read. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Everyone was talking about MSN’s Virtual Earth last week ( ) except Scoble, because he wasn’t to talk about it until the official Microsoft announcement. Scoble vents his frustration in a post that talks about the “word of mouth” effect in the blogosphere. One does ask the question though, “why did MSN release the site if they didn’t want people chatting it up”, doesn’t one? , , , , , Chris writes an excellent essay about recency and how RSS can change the future web. At the end, Chris writes . We hope he’s wrong. :-) So what’s so special about recency? Currently anyone can search google for anything and it will bring up a list of relevant results… but what about NOW? I want to find results in the last 24/12/2 hours. The web as we know it started out with static webpages (the 90’s homepage) and has grown into dynamic webpages – where conversation and comment are the norm (blogging). This produces ever changing content where the ordering of the discussion is the relevancy. Google and the other mainstream search engines currently cater for the old days of static webpages. While this works well now, the future of search and web navigation with relevancy will be much more useful than the web today. (Obviously Technorati are beginning to provide this recency search service to blogging, along with other players).” Business 2.0’s blog notes an article fro and writes From : Kevin Kelley writes an article that will be referenced for years to come: , , , (excellent and funny user comments), , , Fred Wilson shares statistics on the major blog service providers. I hope he doesn’t mind that we grabbed this from his site: Steve continues to carry the torch on the captivating idea of “ ” ( ). He writes: “I’ve been writing about RSS and attention for so long that I’m starting to repeat myself, a sure sign of the difficulty in avoiding wasting your time. So we jumped the gun and put up this site with the help of some brilliant folks who gathered a week ago and contributed their ideas and talents to rough out the basics. I asked, no, pinned Hank Barry down to take the role of Secretary; Hank had suggested the idea of a foundation in the first place. Seth and I fanned out to corral the rest of the initial board: Seth as Chairman, Nick Bradbury, Dick Costolo, and Clay Shirky. And I asked Mary Hodder to chair the Advisory Board and develop its goals and structure. Later today, Seth will join the Gillmor Gang to talk more about attention and our intentions. Already the quality of the conversation about attention has deepened, both in private email exchanges and in feedback from our admittedly premature and sketchy efforts. We’re asking for a leap of faith here, and I always check for my wallet when someone says “trust me.” But we’re choosing our words–and our friends–carefully, and we’re not kidding.” : “Apparently Steve Gillmor is not kidding about attention.” Om reports about an important (read: ridiculous) site…for beautiful people only. Maybe they’ll let us in, just to do a quick profile. :-) Of course it only supports IE, so we can’t see the site. We’re a mac and firefox shop and unless there is a really good reason to fire up IE and the obligatory pop-ups, we don’t. This site doesn’t qualify as a “good reason”. , If you haven’t read Seth’s postings on “Occam’s Paradox”, read them now. They are a play on the principle, which in its simplest form is Seth originally wrote , and updated . ” In the update, Seth writes See also Will Price, , where he talks about the by Anthony Bastardi and Eldar Shafir. I agree. When I need to “get things done”, I switch the internet connection off (really), close email, and try to really . When I was a corporate lawyer, working on documents and agreements, I was able to master this. Now, I really have to try. And when I make decisions, I try (and sometimes am successful) to really get to the core issues, ignoring the extraneous stuff.
, We missed this last week. Great evolving checklist for defining web 2.0 services.
This for you, dad. :-) It sure looks like a middle finger to me. (Via ) And isn’t debatable.
|
Profile – Weblogs.com (Ping Server)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 8 |
1999 Weblogs.com was the first blogging and remains the largest. A ping service is a server that takes “pings” from blogs (and other sources). The purpose of the ping is to notify the ping server that the source has added new content. This is aggregated with other pings and, if the ping server is open, the data becomes available to third parties. The third parties are able to access the URI of the source and the time of the ping. Ping services are not discussed very often. There’s not much to look at (the action is in the xml data), and to date they haven’t charged for their services. However, and are a crucially important piece of the real-time web. Here’s why: Ping servers sit between search engines and blogs. Without ping servers, search engines like feedster, technorati and pubsub would not know if and when blogs and other content sources updated. They would regularly have to index these sites to find out if they’ve updated. With over 10,000,000 blogs, re-indexing every hour would be a massive undertaking – every few minutes, impossible. Instead, they re-index only when a source notifies the ping server that it has updated. It is a much more efficient way for the real-time web to keep “real-time” with only a few minute delay between posting and indexing. There are many ping servers today (see links below for lists), but Weblogs.com was the first and is by far the largest, as it is built into nearly all blogging software.
created Weblogs.com in 1999 as a service to index weblogs. (see also ) as blogs started to grow beyond the point where it was feasible to re-index them regularly. Today Weblogs.com is receiving over 1,000,000 pings per day ( ). Weblogs.com has an and allows anyone to access its data. To ping weblogs.com, a site sends a a simple XML-RPC message to rpc.weblogs.com, port 80, path /RPC2. that includes the feed name (name of blog or other source) and the URL. To access ping data, third parties can access two versions: shows data from the last hour, and shows data from the last five minutes. For more complete information, see the Weblog.com XML-RPC Interface post . audio.weblogs.com is a podcasting ping service. It is very much like weblogs.com, but it includes additional data as well: – size of podcast
– xml feed of podcast
– number of clicks on link (a ranking or popularity feature) Pinging and accessing audio.weblogs.com data is to the normal weblogs.com ping service.
Lists of Ping servers: , ,
|
Profile – NewsGator Online v. Bloglines
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 8 |
2003. in May 2005. This profile reviews only NewsGator’s . NewsGator has a number of other popular products, including an and the products offered by (recently acquired by NewsGator). We will probably profile NewsGator’s other products soon. They’ve recently , and based on its complexity (and user feedback), we suspect things may be further simplified over time. Today, Nick Bradbury (Feeddemon founder) pricing for his product. The reason we like the Online edition is that it is not tied to a single computer. You can log in from anywhere. Also, Bloglines is the gold standard of , and it is natural to compare and contrast the two services (see our Blogines profile ) – easy import of feeds opml file
– two pane interface – clippings, folders and feeds on the left, content on the right (similar to bloglines)
– alphabetizes feeds
– can view all feeds, or just feeds with new content
– fast updating
– great “clipping” tool to save content with one click
– sorting options includ by date, view older/newer first
– nascent search abilities
Bloglines has recently had significant delays in updating feeds – often updating only once a week. That means content comes infrequently and is stale – just the opposite of the core reason for using an RSS reader. Their site is also down quite often (who’s seen the infamous recently?) They are the (other than Yahoo) (Bloglines accounts for about 30% of Techcrunch subscriptions, NewsGator is a close second), but these problems are leading many users to try out other services. However, even with its shortcoming, we find that NewsGator Online is not as good as Bloglines (but it’s close). To test NewsGator, we imported our Bloglines feeds and used it exclusively for a few days. Importing was easy, thanks to the Bloglines export feature and the NewsGator import feature. Snafus are noted below.
1. Feeds are updated much more frequently on NewsGator (a very, very important feature). 2. While both services have a “clippings” feature, we found NewsGator’s to be much easier to use – one click. Also, the clippings folder is added to the main directory on the left pane, whereas bloglines has an additional tab to click to view clipped items. 3. If you want a PC or Mac based desktop client, you have the ability to with that client so you don’t read the same content twice (Bloglines doesn’t offer a desktop service). 4. NewsGator was never down during our testing period. Bloglines is down frequently. 1. Both have two pane interfaces, but Bloglines allows scrolling of the left pane whereas NewsGator doesn’t. This means that you can peruse feeds without losing the content in the right pane. This seems like a small issue, but we found it really annoying when using NewsGator. 2. Bloglines has a “mark all read” feature that clears out all unread content. NewsGator doesn’t have this feature, meaning we had to click on each and every one of our 250+ feeds after importing the opml file to clear out old content. This was a one-time issue, but it certainly got us off on the wrong foot with regard to our NewsGator experience. 3. Both services alphabetize feeds. However, Bloglines disregards “the” before the feedname, and we found it difficult to find the feeds we were used to reading by the name we remembered them by. 4. Bloglines shows the number of subscribers for each feed, and you can view public subscribers. NewsGator doesn’t do this. 5. Bloglines allows you to view public subscriptions of other users (and add them to your own). NewsGator doesn’t have this feature. Bloglines also has a permanent URI for each subscriber’s public feeds. As an example, here are all of on Bloglines. 6. Bloglines has a “keep new” feature for each post that is useful. NewsGator has no equivalent feature. 7. Bloglines has a useful but little known about email feature – you can create an email address and all emails to that address show up as a feed in bloglines. It’s very useful for subscribing to newsletter type emails that you’d rather have in your RSS reader than your email inbox.
Both have great user interfaces, options to open content in a new window or the existing window, options for folders to group feeds and good customer service (inquiries about both were answered promptly, within 24 hours even over a weekend). Neither service has tagging of content, something ( ) has, and we’d like to see further experiments in this area. To be honest, we could be happy with either one. But if forced to choose, we choose Bloglines based on features available today. If the feed updating issue isn’t worked out, however, or if we see that damn bloglines plumber more than once a month, things may change quickly. NewsGator has a good track record of responding quickly to user feedback, and most of the blogines features mentioned here could easily be added to NewsGator. Finally, we note that with the ease of opml exports of feeds, there is no real lock-in of users, and a could easily and quickly gain real market share.
J.B. Holston – CEO and President
Greg Reinacker – CTO and Founder
A.V. “Sandy�? Hamilton – EVP Sales, Marketing and Business Development
Mark Nass – VP of Finance and Administration
(Feeddemon Founder)
( )
(slow bloglines updates)
(bloglines origins)
(a newcomer to think about as an option, with incredible tagging and search options)
|
Profile – Skype (Outlook Toolbar)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 6 |
Company: ( ) July 5, 2005 (Outlook Toolbar) The basic Skype service today allows anyone with a computer to register and call/IM with any other Skype user who’s accepted them as a contact. Think of it as instant messaging with sound. And lots of people are using Skype – they have well over 100 million downloads of their client and over 1 million paying users. The network effect has kicked in big time for Skype. – free p2p calling via a “soft phone” (software on your computer instead of a telephone), with up to 4 people at a time
– basic text IM capabilities
– file uploading
– Skype-Out (call any phone number, for a small per minute charge)
– Skype-In (assign your skype account a phone number, allowing any phone to call you on your computer)
– voicemail There are at least two features that would make it much more compelling – (meaning you can share powerpoint demonstrations, websites, or whatever with people on your call) (see our profile on , which has this as well as video), and (see our profile on , which has this feature as well as others like mapping). But in general Skype is fun, cheap and has decent sound quality.
The new Outlook Toolbar integrates Skype very tightly with Outlook. There is an extremely detailed profile of the product by Peter Henning at as well that I recommend reading if you intend to use the product. It’s a very small download (767k for PC) and installs quickly. In a nutshell, it allows you to: – Use Skype directly from Outlook (the skype client must be running as well)
– associate your Outlook contacts with their skype usernames. You can then Skype them directly from Outlook if they are online. If you get an email from them, you’ll see a skype status icon next to their name, and you can chat or talk with them by clicking. Overall, its a nice integration between two of the most important applications on most PC user’s desktops. Another great feature, which you can see in the image above, is that it enables one-click skype-out calls to the contact’s phone numbers. This “ ” feature is a killer feature. These phone numbers do not need to be separately added to your Skype-Out call list. Overall, this is a great productivity tool for heavy Skype and Outlook users. Peter Kalmstrom
Mat Taylor
( )
(Skype v. Gizmo)
|
Profile: Userplane
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 1 |
2001 Los Angeles Userplane is an application service provider to web 2.0 companies. They offer a suite of easy-to-integrate services, built on the flash platform, including , , a and, soon, a product. Typical Userplane customers are dating and social networking sites (any site that has users who would like to interact and/or create profiles that include audio/video content). The applications are polished, intuitive and fun to use. In their own words, The application suite consists of three apps that each add core, must-have features to thriving community websites: Userplane enables users to record and share audio/video messages, Userplane provides live text and audio/video instant messaging, and Userplane delivers full-featured, multi-room, multi-user text and A/V chatting. Leveraging Macromedia’s ubiquitous Flash, the Apps are lightweight, cross-platform with no user installation, and customizable for a site’s specific needs. Deployed internationally on sites ranging from online dating to social networks to intranets, Userplane Apps reach millions of users in more than ten countries. Userplane Apps dramatically increase online interaction and improve guest-to-member conversion.” This was the first product launched by Userplane. The Webmessenger product is a one-to-one instant messaging client that includes text, audio and video features. Janet Song, Userplane’s Marketing Director, gave us a demo of the product: Webchat is group chat. It has all of the features of web messenger, and also allows users to see who is watching their video and/or listening to their audio. It can support an unlimited number of users, and a single user can view up to four videos simultaneously. This is a feature that sites can add to easily allow their users to record and play back audio/video messages. The products are deployed on the flash platform and non-userplane branded. Pricing starts at $50 per month (there is a that is add supported as well). Integration can be as easy as inserting an html script, or sites can choose a full integration into their database to include user’s site profile information. Userplane keeps a low profile, but their customers are blue-chip – they include friendster, eharmony, honda, date.com and red bull Michael Jones – Co-founder and CEO
Nathanial Thelen – Co-founder and CTO
Javier Hall – Co-founder and CCO
Janet Song – Director of Marketing
|
Profile – Connexion (Boeing)
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 6 |
It’s high speed internet access in the sky. I just posted a and did it all sitting here on an SAS flight from Seattle to Copenhagen (heading to the ICANN conference in Luxembourg next week). The technology for this has been around for a few years, but this is my first experience using it. I’m skype-outing at $0.02 per minute, , IMing with people, uploading and downloading like crazy, and generally making a nuisance of myself to everyone around me. Pricing is $30 for the entire trip. What a wonderful productivity tool for long flights while we research, use and write about new web2.0 services!
(from the parking lot at first :-) )
|
Profile – FeedShake
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 24 |
July 21, 2005 (estimated) FeedShake is a website that creates a single RSS feed from multiple RSS feeds. You can also filter out posts that contain specified keywords, and/or filter in posts only if they contain specified keywords. The site is incredibly easy to use (it takes mere moments to create an aggregated feed) and no registration or email address is required. Similar services are listed by libary clips . According to Library Clips, ( ) The feed is auto-named “FeedShake” but can of course be renamed in your reader to whatever you want. It would be nice to be able to auto-rename the feed when it’s created so that other users would have the title you selected. Other current limitations: We’d be happy to pay for naming and stats on the feed. :-) We tested the service by burning a combined feed of TechCrunch and , another Archimedes blog. The feed is: http://www.feedshake.com/feed.php?code=wc5mjf0wz4. The feed works great. Awesome service. We love it.
, , , , , , , ,
|
Profile: Gizmo
|
Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 7 | 1 |
<img src='http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/gizmologo.gif' alt='' border=1 / Launched: June 30, 2005 Gizmo is like skype but is built on open source. It’s available for Mac and Windows (3.1 mb download on windows), with a Linux version promised in August. A problem with Skype is that it is a closed silo – it will not interconnect with other VOIP systems. Gizmo, however, is built on the open source, standards-based net calling program built by . According to Gizmo, there are over 100 applications peering with SIPphone technology ( ). Gizmo has nearly every feature that Skype has, plus a few really cool things Skype doesn’t do. It does lack instant messaging, however. Once it has that, it will be superior to what Skype offers today, and at a much lower price. Here is a feature-by-feature comparison:
We tested a call earlier today and the quality was on par or better than Skype. The user interface is slick and very much what people are used to seeing with Skype and IM clients: There is no set limit to the number of callers, but they recommend only 4 (or more if people are on mute): – open source
– works on SIP standard
– works with any WiFi SIP phone
– free voicemail
– call record (awesome)
– Call in from POTS
– Call out to POTS
– map call location The “map call” feature is really cool. Clicking on it during a call pulls up a map with lines across the globe showing caller locations: Michael Robertson
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.