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Web 2.0 This Week (August 21-27)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 28 |
I spent most of this week in Palo Alto working on Archimedes Ventures projects. I was able to post about most of the companies I met at Bar Camp (with one notable exception, which is to come). Lots of interesting Web 2.0 news to report from the week as well. continues to lead the small but growing group of blogs defining Web 2.0 thinking. Our respective weekly summaries are very different and rarely overlap. Reading his blog is necessary to getting an overall picture of what’s going on. I read every word he writes, and it is time well spent (I actually also subscribe to his delicious links). There are a few other blogs that I have recently added to my reader and that I highly recommend. , written by Oliver Starr, is an extremely popular blog that touches on many new technologies affecting the Web 2.0 space. Check it out. I also recommend , written by Tara Hunt (who recently moved to San Francisco to work at a new Web 2.0 company called ) and , a blog written by Amber MacArthur in Toronto. If anyone is interested in getting my entire opml file for my RSS reader, just send me a note and I’ll send you the link. Here’s this week’s summary: , , , , , (update), (update), , , , , “Charlie”, an analyst for (Fred Wilson’s firm), with the above title, giving good advice on starting a successful Web 2.0 company. Advice includes such wisdoms as ” Launch. Now. Tomorrow. Every day.”, “” Solve the smallest possible problem”, and “Get a responsive and chatty audience using the product.” Good stuff. For those of you new to the idea of microformats, I recommend reading . He lists some of the more popular efforts in the area, and also opines on the value of disaggregating “content” from applications. My focus here is on the economic value of stuff about stuff, and one example of that is that as a user on the internet, a lot of value is resident in the data about you, or the data that you create. If microformats help to separate this data from applications, it becomes easier to put it and its value under the control of the user, where I think it belongs. Brad Feld has been posting on aspects of venture capital term sheets for the last few months. He and linked to previous posts on the subject. It’s a total of 20 posts and in my opinion, they should pdf it and sell it. Bookmark this link for future use. gave one of the better presentations at Bar Camp last weekend. Sound advice on the venture capital process from someone who’s been in the business for years. See his post and download his presentation . If you are a young Web 2.0 company who needs solid advice, try to work with Jeff. He only works with 4-5 companies at a time, and they tend to be winners. If you are interested in China ( ), you’ll want to read this (See as well). He is the founder of , one of the leading blog service providers in China. Chilling stuff: Q: But, as you say, the political environment in China means there’s a lot that people can’t express in their blogs. A: Sometimes there are people who write about Taiwanese independence and the Falun Gong. Q: And what happens when they try to do that? A: We set up keywords for our programs, like “Falun Gong,” and when you type in those keywords, you cannot post them. It just shows up as stars. Everybody has that. Q: People can avoid using those words, though. A: The problem exists, but it’s not a big one. We can immediately fix it, and it’s not a problem. Maybe there are some words that aren’t in the keywords, but if they’re published, they don’t fit the content. Then the Internet police will call us, and we will delete it within 24 hours. If it lasts on the site too long, then maybe it will make some trouble. Maybe I will have to go to the police station. Q: How often have you had to do that? A: That has never happened. The phone calls seldom happen -– only four or five times in two years. We have a specialist who takes care of this. These people [who post the forbidden things] are not real bloggers. They know it will be deleted. Q: There has been a lot of talk in the past few months about the Chinese government requiring bloggers who don’t use sites like yours to register their real names and contacts if they want to keep on blogging. How difficult is it for Blogcn users to set up their blogs? A: To set up a blog you have to give your password, e-mail address, blogger name, and choose a template. It’s very easy. We don’t need their phone number, their address, their ID number. [The environment] is much better than before. Step by step, it’s getting more open. Two of my joined Paul Scrivens’ 9Rules Network last week. Looks like 9Rules is aggresively expanding beyond their core topic of web design. A complete list of their current blogs is at the bottom of page. Congratulations to Richard and Brian. Jupiter Research published a report detailing the average consumer of blogs. See , and for summaries of the report. In general, those of us into blogs and related stuff are male, rich and young. Since rich and young are subjective, I can safely say that I am at least one of the three. From (summarizing from eweek): * “The average consumer of blogs, RSS/XML feeds and Podcasts is male, earns big bucks and, in the case of podcasts, is a youngster�? * “In a June survey of some 4,000 Internet users, Jupiter found that over the past year, only 11 percent had read a blog monthly or more frequently. While that’s a small percentage, it does show healthy growth; in 2004, for example, only 6 percent of those surveyed regularly read blogs.” * “Those who are hooked into Podcasts are an even smaller group, with only 7 percent of those surveyed having downloaded or listened to a Podcast regularly in the past year. RSS or XML feed junkies are the most elite group, with only 3 percent of respondents reporting that they regularly receive information through these channels” * “Of RSS/XML users surveyed, 89 percent said they regularly buy stuff online. Of regular blog consumers surveyed, 77 percent purchase goods and services online, while 69 percent of Podcast aficionados regularly buy online. That compares with 62 percent of the total online population who do so.” * “At this point, 30 percent of companies with $50 million or more in annual revenue have deployed RSS feeds, according to the report, while another 28 percent have indicated they intend to offer RSS feeds this year.” Duncan Riley at Blog Herald writes a loooong post titled “ “. and pitch in their thoughts as well. Justinsomnia about a Web 2.0 drinking game: When someone says… * Web 2.0 – take a drink
* Long Tail – finish your drink
* Open Source Stack – take a shot
* Monetizing – take a drink
* Productizing – take a drink
* Business Models (plural) – take a shot
* Ruby on Rails – everyone trade drinks
* Ajax/AJAX – pour out half your drink (for your homies)
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Update – Technorati (multiple tag search)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 17 |
just announced that . With this new functionality, you can do a single search and find posts that have any of the two or more tags you type in. Niall says: You can now search Technorati for multiple tags! Just separate each tag with the word “OR” to add an posts tagged with your specified tag to your search results. Multiple tags are a great way to follow your favorite topics while accounting for the variety of methods people tag their posts. displays the latest posts indexed by Technorati tagged with either “college” or “university.” You could also mix tags in an area of interest such as tracking the mobile gaming industry through a . I am sure you have many more ideas how multiple tag search can help you discover new content and keep informed of the latest events in the topics you care about. Enjoy! Ok, cool. This saves a bit of time on certain searches. ? Create “AND” functionality and allow us to filter by multiple keywords. That will get us to super-relevant results, fast.
, and
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Profile – Goowy
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 17 |
has rebuilt a number of commonly used applicatons (like email) in Flash. It includes traditional web services such as email, contacts, calendar, games and widgets. Goowy is highly interactive and, as you’d expect with a flash application – fast. Visually it is a very beautiful site as well, and I wasted a good amount of time today playing around with the applications (including some very addictive games). Goowy is one of the first full featured internet applications that uses Flash 8. For more detail, see ‘s post on Goowy, although I disagree with some of the conclusions in this post – Ajax, xforms and other technologies are gunning for some of these same applications right now. Flash-heavy sites are, however, currently quite trendy, and Goowy seems to be one of the best implementations. While flash can be heavy work for some simple stuff, Macromedia’s current efforts with Flex (as Mark Birbeck tells me) will make Flash a lot easier by using a high-level language on the server. Once you’ve registered for the service, a virtual desktop appears that allows you to access the various applications. The email application is excellent. You are assigned a goowy address (ours is [email protected]), and it also allows users to POP into Goowy from other accounts. Alex Bard, Goowy’s CEO, tells me that they are expanding email capabilities in the near future. Alex also tells me that Macromedia has been very supportive of Goowy, which explains how they have grown to 30,000 users with virtually no marketing: Macromedia has been a great partner to us. They have supported us in both marketing and development. We have been mentioned in several Macromedia press releases including the most recent Studio 8 release. In addition we have been their site of the day several times (most recently on Aug 9th). In addition we are working with them on more awareness / marketing initiatives in the near future which are very exciting. Alex also wrote to me about upcoming features: We have some very exciting functionality in our development lab right now. In the next 30 days we are releasing an advanced calendar and some other “fun” features. In addition we have virtual desktop storage, wireless integration, video streaming, widgets, open APIs, and more in development. It is going to be an exciting time for goowy over the next 6 months. Goowy’s business model includes advertising and, later, premium subscription pricing and licensing of the platform. They have 8 employees. Alex Bard – CEO
Gary Benitt – COO
Jeremy Suriel – CTO / Chief Architect
Sashi Bommakanty – VP Product Development (interview with Alex Bard), ,
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Event – Bar Camp (Day 1)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 19 |
Today I drove over 300 miles (Los Angeles to Palo Alto) to get to . I believe that was the farthest distance anyone traveled, although I haven’t fact-checked that yet. In fact, I haven’t fact checked anything below, so if there are errors please email me or leave a comment and I’ll fix it. It was worth the drive. The event started at 7:00. Everyone had to “sign in” and “take a picture” which consisted of writing your name in a marker pen on a long scrolling paper and drawing your own avatar. People loved it – and there were a (minus a who never made it out of the cafe :-)). There was a working “wiki” literally written up on a whiteboard (real here) and people were free to add discussion topics to the agenda for either of the two meeting rooms. Pizza was delivered. There was a referigerator full of beer (less full later in the evening). And there was wide open wifi. Paradise. My notes for the day are below. This is by no means a transcript of what happened (there was just too much). But it is my views and opinions on the stuff I was able to participate in. After introductions (led by and from Flock), led a discussion about how to (quickly, easily, informally) create a communication and feedback mechanism for attendees (including those not physically present). Lots of good ideas, mostly centered around the wiki since it’s up and running. By the way, if you haven’t read it yet, check out Chris’ post on . Ross also spoke about a new product that Social Text has soft-launched, called . It deserves its own profile (and will get one if I can corner Ross long enough to talk about it a bit more), but it is basically a tool to allow people to edit wiki’s without using wiki code. Try out the – you can double click on any text on the page and toggle between a wysiwyg editor, a wikitext editor, and preview. If they add authorization functionality, this would be one great way to edit your own blog, as well. Mike Prince, the founder of , gave a brief demo of his company. There wasn’t enough time for me to fully understand Mobido, but it is a network for sharing photos and short content (names, contact info, etc.) around an event. One use of this is for everyone at an event to take a picture of themselves and post in on a Mobido event page, along with their name, etc., and people can see everyone who attended and know who they are. There are RSS capabilities as well. This is another company I’d like to profile. I walked in to this session a bit late. The official title was “blogging for Profit” and was led by (Technorati). The discussion evolved into a general discussion of “what is blogging” and “why do people blog” over time. made an interesting comment in response to a question. Jeff, who is a VC, said he blogs because it helps him network with companies and gives him leads. I agree that few VCs are blogging, and most that do blog mostly about being a VC ( of course). You can tell from Jeff’s blog that he is more than open to getting communications from new companies, and it has served him very, very well. I also think blogging, if you do it intensely, gives you excellent insight into developing trends way before everyone else sees them. You get this partly from reading blogs, and partly from comments and email from people talking about what they are doing. Interaction, lead generation and early intelligence is (mostly) why I love writing for TechCrunch so much. As a related aside, I hear that a I profiled a month ago may be getting some more mainstream press in the near future. :-) The session ended with (click…subscribed to feed) suggesting that the group consider attempting to categorize blogs by intent or subject matter. A big task in my opinion. gave a presentation of his “motorcycle” project – a sniffer of content on wifi networks. He proved the power of his application by reading out random passwords of people in the audience (who where blogging, checking email, etc., while listening). The occasional “Crap! that’s mine” and “please shut this off” was heard. I simply shut down my computer. He talked about how easy it is to “own someone” by monitoring their traffic. Because people tend to recycle passwords, he said, once you have one password you likely have access to their entire life. Scary stuff. Jacob also noted that many new web 2.0 companies, like flickr, are not hashing passwords as they are sent over the net, meaning they can easily be sniffed by anyone monitoring the local network. He’s launching motorcyle as an open source project “for people to use and enjoy.” By the way, Jiwire has a product called that will encrypt your traffic and help you avoid this type of thing. $5 a month, free to try. I’ll be installing it before tomorrow morning. I met a number of interesting people tonight and subscribed to their blogs. I’m sure there will be lots more over the weekend.
I am also looking forward to ‘s presentation on tomorrow, and ‘s presentation on venture capital on Sunday. Hell, I may even get up and say something clever myself at some point.
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Update – Rojo (new stuff)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 19 |
Rojo launched two new features this week: expanded tag functionality and top 100 feeds. Rojo now lists the subscribed to by users. The top ten include the usual suspects, which at least shows that Rojo users are pretty mainstream v. other readers. They call it the . You can also view the most read feeds for any given tag. This second part is more interesting. The top 100 is just another list – not super interesting as a stand alone feature. However, the ability to type a tag and see the most popular feeds based on the tag is, actually, quite useful. In particular, we like the results for the tag “ “, which lists and TechCrunch in the top two spots (looks perfect to us!). Now you can see the most read feeds in Rojo at any one time. Call it the Rojo 100. This list will change all the time, as Rojo users reading habits grow and evolve. Lists are all the rage these days, but while the list of the top 100 most read feeds in Rojo might be interesting, what’s MORE interesting is seeing the most read feeds in a particular topic area. To find the most read feeds in any number of topic areas, simply search for a feed tag–that is a word used to describe an RSS feed–in our feed tag directory and sort the results by popularity. This way you will find the most read feeds in a particular subject area in Rojo. Turning attention into serendipity–that’s what we are about. Rojo is one of the only feed readers to allows tagging of feeds and posts. They are starting to release tools to help users find new content based on other users’ tags. Check out popular feeds based on the tags you select: This week in Rojo a cool new feature: ! (RUGFEED??) Can’t find the RSS feed you are looking for? Our feed directory of around 100,000 feeds has been categorized by YOU–the Rojo user. In the “Tag” section of Rojo there is now a “Feeds” sub-section where you can find the most recently and most frequently tagged feeds in Rojo. You can also scope feed lists by All Users, or just your contacts–or yourself. The most commonly used feed tags are shown in the left sidebar, and you can search for a single feed tag to help you find the exact feed you are looking for. Want to find food blogs? Just search for feeds tagged “food” and you are on your way. You can see related tags as well. You can tag a feed when you first add it, or edit your feed tags in the Manage Feeds page. See the for more information.
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The Big Moo by Seth Godin
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 26 |
is my favorite business writer right now. In fact, as I look around, my desk is littered with copies of his books – (my favorite), , and . Read these books and learn about how to build and market products that will excite your customers. See for a short interview with Seth by Brian Oberkirch. I haven’t had the opportunity to meet Seth in person yet, but I sure hope to. I’ll probably act like a teenage girl meeting some cool pop band, and not know what to say. Maybe I’ll get a picture with him. That would be cool. His books are crisply written and to the point. And his points are good. One of my favorite quotes, from Purple Cow, is: If someone in your organization is charged with creating a Purple Cow, Don’t use internal reviews and usability testing to figure out if the new product is as good as what you’ve got now. Instead, pick the right maverick and get out of the way. As I mentioned in a recent (see no. 6), Seth’s new book, , is coming out and he’s eating his own dogfood in promoting it. Seth has started selling batches of 50 galley copies to people if they promise to “sneeze” the book to other influential people. I purchased 50 copies, and am now offering them to TechCrunch readers. By the way, the book is another winner. It’s a collaborative effort – Seth has brought in 33 “of the world’s smartest business thinkers” to write the book. I started it last night and have almost finished it. I am learning to not be boring. I am trying to be fearless. I am going to risk it all (more on this later…edgeio). I am giving these books away. The first 10 comments to this post get a free copy. I’ll even pay the shipping if you are in the US or Canada. If you are somewhere else, I’ll ask for $5 in shipping. did the same thing and got an overwhelming response. I’ll send another batch to the first 10 people who post about the book and trackback here. Same rules apply on shipping. If you comment, I already have your email address. If you trackback, make sure you send you email me at [email protected] along with the post URL. Once I have the 20 complete, I’ll send out a mass email to get your shipping address. Good luck to those of you who use slow RSS readers. :-)
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Rollyo – Roll your own search engine
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 26 |
Due to a misunderstanding, I posted a profile of Rollyo while the company was in private beta and did not want any publicity (the misunderstanding was that I didn’t know this when I posted). They have requested that I remove the post for now, and I am complying. Nothing heavy, I just received a very polite email request from a very smart employee of the company. In my opinion, all this controversy just adds more buzz and is ultimately good for the company. And I also understand that Rollyo would like to keep things a little quiet for now as they work through the beta. I look forward to re-posting when the time is right. In the meantime, I’m going to keep testing the site. Good things are going on over there. Check it out (by requesting a beta invite).
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Flock – Social Browsing is Cool
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 26 |
is a new browser, built on top of firefox. It is a functional browser with excellent features (including firefox features like tabbed browsing, etc.). What really makes is stand out are two additional features they’ve added to build social networking directly into the browsing experience: social bookmarking and a wysiwyg blog writing tool. Flock was originally called and raised money (reportedly around $1 million) from Bessemer Venture Partners. For more on the fundraising and early reports, see and . We got our first look at Flock at last weekend – Andy Smith and Chris Messina gave a great demo. Our beta invitation came that weekend as well. Flock should be launching publicly sometime in September. They have windows, mac and linux versions of their browser already. Flock has integrated del.icio.us-type features right into the browser. When you are on a page you would like to bookmark, simply press a “+” button on the top left of the toolbar and the page is automatically included in your bookmark area (called your “breadcrumbs”). You can also tag bookmarks, of course. Additional features include your “watchlist” (people who’s bookmarks you would like to monitor), and “groups” (basically, defined groups of flockers linking to this category). Breadcrumbs, Watchlists and Groups all have RSS feeds (of course). This is pure magic. We’ve tested most blogging tools out there, including qumana (the best in our opinion – profiled and ), blogjet ( ) and others. All of these requre a download and allow offline drafting and wysiwyg functionality. I have to say I think Flock blows them all away. I’m dying to show a screen shot, but Flock has asked it’s beta testers not to (so ignore the very, very small screen shot above). To show this right now would be pushing the limits of their trust, so I won’t. But it rocks. Setup was very easy (I tested it with my personal blog). It has functionality for editing posts (even posts not created with Flock), quick toggle between preview and viewing the actual code, and, the best feature in my opinion, the ability to simply drag flickr photos direclty into the post and manipulate them. They also allow quick and easy technorati tagging. Wow. I mean, really, wow. This stuff is not trivial to build. The ajax funtionality is stunning. is Flock’s CEO and co-founder. The rest of the team includes: has an exellent early review. Also see: , , , , ,
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Event – Bar Camp (Day 2)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 21 |
Day 2 of was, if possible, more interesting than Day 1 (perhaps becasue Day 1 was only 5 hours, while Day 2 was a full 24 hours). I had to slip out in the late afternoon to go to the in Berkeley, but saunterd back in late evening just as the drinking binge was getting into full swing. But the drinking and partying was justified. It was a long and productive day. Notes below. Once again, I need to point out that I saw only a small fraction of the total stuff that was going on. . It’s also the tag on Flickr right now. The most exciting presentation of the day was . I wasn’t there for it, of course, but Tom Conrad, Padora’s CTO, gave me a private demo earlier in the day and I . Make sure you check this one out.
and has additional company information. (“Social browser based on the Mozilla engine to give you the tools to talk back to the web”) gave an excellent showing off their brand new stuff. I have a beta invite and will be profiling Flock this week. I met some incredibly interesting people yesterday, including , , and (who created the Bar Camp logo). I was also able to spend time hanging out with Sam Perry, who I first met at Always On and who is becoming a good friend. Had a late night dinner with Steve Gillmor, Dave Winer, Niall Kennedy, Robert Scoble and Buzz Bruggeman as well. I didn’t realize I broke the news in my . This was blogged on by later as well yesterday, and Ross Mayfied . This is going to be talked about a lot in the coming weeks. Do I look like I can fit into a medium tshirt? For the love of God, people, get your act together and order some more XL tshirts! On a related note, do you really think you can leave boxes of KitKats and other junk food around and I won’t eat 10 of them? That’s irresponsible. :-) Heading back now for more presentations and junk food. By the way, our Day 1 Notes on Bar Camp was by far our ever.
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Google Sidebar to Launch Monday
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 21 |
I just saw this link to . Thanks ! The is reporting that Google will release a new product tomorrow called “Sidebar”. As far as I can tell the product is not available at Google yet (as of 10:00 PM PST on Sunday). The WSJ reports that Sidebar will be available on Monday and will provide information including email, weather, stocks, and desktop search alongside whatever content users are viewing. It appears that Sidebar will self-customize based on user activities and will also include a text editor that allows users to write and store text files. , ,
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Dave Winer's Purple Cow – the OPML Editor
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 21 |
Dave Winer has been working on outlining software for over 20 years. Check out his (OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language) that has recently come out of private beta – people are using it for everything from writing and updating simple to-do lists to creating and editing blogs. It’s extremely versatile and it’s open source. OPML an XML-based format that allows exchange of outline-structured information between applications running on different operating systems and environments. Since people are writing exhaustively about the product and the technology (and using it for ), I want to talk about it from a different angle. For those of you familiar with , you’ll know what a is. The basic idea of the purple cow is that for products to be noticed in today’s world of fragmented attention and product saturation, it has to be something really special. You don’t notice cows any more no matter how cool they are (because they are basically all the same), but you sure would notice a big purple cow munching on some grass in a field somewhere. Dave has in my opinion masterfully crafted a purple cow with his OPML Editor. I’ve been witnessing its development and launch for a while now, and I’m impressed. The first time I saw the software in action was earlier this year in New York (Dave gave me a demo). The second time I saw it was just before the this year in Seattle. That’s about the time that Dave put his marketing efforts into high gear. After the sofware was (mostly) baked, Dave invited a small group of trusted friends to bang on it. Because this was such a select group, the people involved really felt special (and they were). They went out of their way to provide good feedback. He took their input and made changes. Then he increased the size of the group to 20 or so (I was in this group). At Gnomedex, he increased the size further. All the while, Dave was getting free QA and product work, and these people were blogging about how awesome and powerful it was. Lots of people read the blogs of the testers, and want to know more. Heck, I begged him to be on the invite list. On June 23, 2005, Dave that he would start using the OPML editor to edit Scripting News, his blog: I’m sure this doesn’t mean a lot to most people, but I’m now using the OPML Editor to create and edit Scripting News. In the business, we call this Eating The Dogfood, which is actually kind of a gross image (you have to see your users as dogs, which may not be very healthy). Anyway using the product yourself helps reinforce its reality, to me. Even more people learn about the software and understand that it can be used for things like writing and editing blogs, and want to know more. Dave, who travels quite a bit anyway, started to hold OPML Editor road shows around the country. I believe the first one was in , and he’s been in many cities since. Tonight, he had a road show in , and 100+ people to see the Editor in action. I was there, and people were interested, inquisitive and downright about it. More users check it out. It’s available now, so people are starting to use it for unexpected things, and it grows virally. Dave is not a professional marketer, but he’s one of the best marketers I’ve seen. He’s spent exactly nothing in marketing dollars to promote the product (unless you count gas money), and yet he’s created a whole group of influential users (mostly bloggers who sneeze about the product) who feel special because they were part of the closed testing group. Not to mention hundreds more who’ve attended his road shows because Dave made the effort to come to them, show them the product and patiently answer the same questions over and over in different cities. And yes, Dave is also eating his own dog food by using his product to write one of the most popular blogs on the internet ( out of 14 million or so total blogs). I’m impressed.
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Web 2.0 This Week (July 31 – Aug. 6)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 7 |
A lot happened in our web 2.0 world this last week. Lots of new data was published by Dave Sifry and Technorati, additional work was done on the definition of “web 2.0″, as well as lots of other developments (see below for all). I was forced to cut some things from the wrapup this week because otherwise it would have simply been too long otherwise. For instance, I had the following items in my notes, but they have been scrapped: Before I get into the main items, I want to point to a new blog I read (I do not know the blogger but I have pointed to it once or twice) that had a post last week entitled “ “. The post is self explanatory. Since of our industry every once in a while reach out to their readers to make sure they are still there, I ask those of you who are so inclined to reach out and leave a comment on this blog. This isn’t pity, or charity. It’s simply helping one blogger get over that initial hurdle. I also want to thank . Ok, back to business. This week’s wrapup: , , (name change), , , , , , , , , (Link Tracker), , , , Technorati updated last week with new stats, and the blogosphere’s growth certainly doesn’t seem to have peaked yet. We (as in “we the blogosphere”) are averaging about 1,000,000 new posts per day, even on slow news days. Six months ago it was less than 200,000/day. And the total number of blogs continues to double approximately every five months. This information is simply staggering, even as we are becoming somewhat deaf to new staggering information. CNET names the “ “. I knew and loved most of these companies, and remember those lovely days when just about any idea could get funded. Yes, we all burned through money on stupid things like television ads (too bad hadn’t been written yet or we’d know better) and million dollar parties, but at least it was a learning experience, right? :-) And dammit, we LOVED Webvan. We really, really loved them. and added to Richard MacManus’ to define Web 2.0 earlier this year (with further thoughts by as well). A separate thread, started by and countered by , argues whether or not Web 2.0 is a meme or a faux-meme. I’m not smart enough to comment on this – I had to look up what meant on Google just to follow the conversation. :-) I will say this though. Those of us that spend all day, every day, thinking about Web 2.0 aren’t able to define it in a single sentence. We know its important, and it’s happening right now, but we just aren’t quite able to verbalize it. Yet. When Fred Wilson writes, thousands of people eagerly consume it. He’s smart and he doesn’t go on and on – he gets to his point. His post “ ” is one of his best essays so far. I like to keep things simple. And to me blogging is about three things: Posting, Subscribing, and Tagging. These are the three essential and fundamental functions and they are the building blocks for all the different kinds of blogging. Blogging is not limited to posting a short blast of text into Blogger, Typepad, WordPress, or Live Journal. Blogging is way bigger than that. Fred also stresses that we are just getting started, and that the best stuff is yet to come. We agree. , , , The problem with publisher tagging is that it is begging for spam. And it’s starting to appear. See and on this topic. tipped us off to a . It’s worth the read – particuarly if you are going to start a new one. was held in Frankfurt on August 4-8, 2005. Lots of bloggers attended and, you guessed it, blogged. I would very much have liked to attend. , , , , , , Bill Machrone looks at blogging software, and gives appropriate kudos to . I don’t disagree with the article, but I will say this. Blogging software sucks. And there is huge room for improvement. When my dad can publish a professional looking and customizable blog without knowing a thing about html or CSS or RSS or Atom or categories or tags or anything else, then talk to me about how great blogging software is. Sorry folks, it’s not even close to time to start patting ourselves on the back yet. Somebody needs to do for blogging what ( ) did for invoices. Then we’ll be somewhere. Give me a user interface with Ajax! If you have a newsletter, a club or organization site, or an online publication for a niche audience, though, blog software is just about perfect. That’s what I needed for a site I wanted to build: something with built-in reader commentary, RSS syndication, template-based article entry, and the ability to make style changes without having to find and replace across every HTML page. (via Anil Dash at )
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Profile – Zopa
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 7 |
, based in London, is a lending network. Zopa synidicates loans requested by “borrower” members out to “lender” members, based on criteria and parameters set by both parties. Zopa stands for “Zone of Possible Agreement”, which “is the overlap between one person’s bottom line (the lowest they’re prepared to get for something) and another person’s top line (the most they’re prepared to give for something). It’s the way people negotiate all sorts of stuff – buying a car, getting a mortgage – even a teenager negotiating with parents about staying out late. If there’s no Zopa, there’s no deal.” Zopa is the first lending and borrowing exchange. What we do is very simple. We put people who want to lend in touch with credit-worthy people who want to borrow. And because there’s no middle-man – the borrower pays just a 1% exchange fee to Zopa upfront – both benefit. We’re not sure about the “no middle-man” argument since Zopa is, in effect, acting as a middle-man and taking a 1% cut, but the idea is brilliant nonetheless, and it certainly seems to make it easier for people to borrow small amounts of money at reasonable rates. In order to lend or borrow, Zopa does a background and credit check on you to ensure that you are appropriate for their market. They attempt to do this online and with as little hassle to you as possible. Once you are approved you can lend or borrow money within various limits. For instance, you may borrow from £1000 to £15000, in £500 increments. Lenders can loan a minimum of £500 and a maximum of £25,000. If you’d like to lend more than £25,000, you must obtain a license to become a “consumer lending business”. Zopa will help you through this process. Zopa spreads the lending risk among many borrows to reduce overall loss risk. Contracts are set at £10 each and must be spread among at least 50 different borrowers. And Zopa aggresively pursues bad debts:
If one of your borrowers defaults, Credit Resource Solutions Ltd, a collections agency, will undertake to recover any money outstanding. Should it be unable to do so after 120 days, you agree to sell the debt to a collections agency for a price that will be agreed at the time, but which will not be less than 10% of the amount then outstanding. The agency will pay a fixed percentage of the outstanding amount to us which we will pass back to you. We will not allow that borrower to borrow again and will suspend their membership. Furthermore, we will pass their details back to our credit referencing agency which may affect their ability to get credit in the future. Zopa claims 16,000 registered members. Currently, Zopa is only open to U.K. residents who are more than 18 years old and have a bank account and personal Equifax credit rating. Additional information is available at their site. The Zopa team (quite a long list) can be viewed . (we first saw this at Scott’s site), (podcast interview with Zopa’s CFO, James Alexander and its Inventor, Dave Nicholson – includes partial transcript), , , , , ,
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Skype Now Has Call Forwarding
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 31 |
(previous ) – 1.4.0.45 – of their client today. There are a bunch of new features (all are listed below), but there is one that really interesting feature that in my opinion changes the whole VOIP game. Skype now has a true call forwarding feature, I hadn’t picked up on this until I read a great Skype blog called a few minutes ago. Call forwarding in an of itself is not new for Skype – has had a call forwarding feature in their Skype add-on for some time. However, with Jyve, you had to be logged in to Skype for calls to forward. It was a necessary limitation (out of Jyve’s control), but when I’m logged into Skype I calls forwarded. It’s when I’m logged out and away from my computer that I want this. So when I saw this I got pretty excited. But it is not clear from the Skype or their whether or not you had to be logged in for call forwarding to work. So I tested it. Jan and I each called eachother when we were logged off, and Skype dutifully forwarded the calls to our cell phones. Perfect! Under advanced settings, you can actually set three separate forwarding numbers, and each will ring in the order you set. When you are offline, a special icon appears letting people know they can call you and it will forward to a normal phone. Here are all of the new features: 1.Call Forwarding – You can set your Skype client to forward to 1 or multiple PSTN numbers simultaneously, or to another Skype name. 2.Peronalise Skype – You can choose from a wide selection of sounds, ringtones and pictures to customize your Skype experience! 3.Improved Search and Add a Contact functions — cleaner, more intuitive features and layout… and smarter results! 4.Friendlier Getting Started & Import Contact Wizards & visual setup guides & dynamic tooltips — make getting started even easier! 5.One-click calls from any website with Outlook and IE toolbars 6.Improved Voice Quality 7.New Skype sounds!
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Update – Meetro (Google Acquisition?)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 9 |
There are that ( ), a location aware instant messaging platform and application, may be this week. We’ve been using meetro for a couple of weeks and love the service.
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Profile – MSN Filter
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 9 |
is the latest MSN product release from Microsoft. Filter is a blogging network similar to ( ) and – meaning they have hired bloggers to blog about specific subject areas and let them go. They’ve already evolved the product (by adding the blogger’s name, something they were originally criticized for not having), and we assume further enhancements will come over time. From the by , Filter’s lead project manager: Today we officially launched MSN Filter. Filter has been kind of a labor of love for me as a pet project for us to create more of a dialog with the online community and build a closer relationship with consumers. The model is essentially Nanopublishing as originally championed by Nick Denton at Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc. Both great blog networks with their own audiences that they’ll continue to be successful with. Days like this are why I love to work at Microsoft. There is nothing more rewarding than watching an idea become a reality through the hard work of a dedicated team who care about making a difference. The people at MSN care about making a difference. With MSN Filter I hope to increase awareness of Blogs and give users a voice and forum to submit interesting content to our hired bloggers. This is something we want to learn from and evolve over time. So if you’re out there we’re listening! The current topic channels, and the bloggers for each channel, are: Blog opinions so far have been , although a lot of the has come from people not liking the original format that didn’t name the bloggers. It seems to us that some of the original criticism was too aggresive – Filter has . In the meantime and while we await additional channels and product enhancements, we’ve subscribed to the . , Lead Product Manager , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Google Purge is on the way (humor)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 31 |
The (yeah, the Onion :-)) that Google will soon be launching “Google Purge”. Google Purge will, apparently, be an effort to . I’m a big fan of the Onion, and they really nailed it this time. From the article: The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites. As a part of Purge’s first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google. And later: “Book burning is just the beginning,” said Google co-founder Larry Page. “This fall, we’ll unveil Google Sound, which will record and index all the noise on Earth. Is your baby sleeping soundly? Does your high-school sweetheart still talk about you? Google will have the answers.” Page added: “And thanks to Google Purge, anything our global microphone network can’t pick up will be silenced by noise-cancellation machines in low-Earth orbit.” As a part of Phase One operations, Google executives will permanently erase the hard drive of any computer that is not already indexed by the Google Desktop Search. “We believe that Google Desktop Search is the best way to unlock the information hidden on your hard drive,” Schmidt said. “If you haven’t given it a try, now’s the time. In one week, the deleting begins.” And the best for last: The company’s new directive may explain its…buildup of a . Via
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Ojos – Auto Name & Tag Your Photos
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 31 |
hasn’t launched yet, and may even change it’s name. But a bit of buzz has started about them already, stoked by a post by and followed by . The company’s founders include Burak Gokturk, a Stanford Ph.D. who holds 15 patents in facial recognition (according to Rob Hof) (other team members below), which gives us some idea of what they are up to. The idea behind Ojos is that they will take the photos stored on your hard drive and apply face and text recognition technologies to guess who and what is included in a photo. Tag one photo including a person, and Ojos can automatically tag all other pictures that include that person with the same tags. It sounds simple, but the the technology needed to do this is not. The way I am thinking of this is that Ojos solves the long tail problem with my thousands of unnamed, untagged photos. Sure, I put the occasional picture up on and and go to the trouble of tagging them, but the vast majority are simply filed away on my hard drive under a general topic and month the picture was taken. This could fix that. One of the co-founders, Munjal Shah, has started a blog and has occasionally on Ojos with additional information. Ojos has also hired , who I’ve been bugging daily for an invite to the alpha (no luck yet). She did send me a very small screen shot of some pictures that have been processed with Ojos – see image to left. I’m pretty sure she gave me permission to post this. :-) The image includes pictures of Tara over the years, identified and organized by Ojos. It recognized her even through hair color changes. Tara has also about Ojos. If you’d like to get in line for the beta, send an email to “beta at ojos-inc.com”. I’m looking forward to trying this out. Munjal Shah
Burak Gokturk
Azhar Khan
Tara Hunt
Ben Lee
Kuang-chih Lee
Vincent Vanhoucke
Dan Chiao
Danny Yang
Neelesh Vaikhary
Sandeep Gain
Sowmya Karnad
Ginto Mathew
Piyush Partani
Nikhil Pal Singh
Nitin Agarwal
Vineet Bhardwaj
Drago Anguelov
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Writely – Process Words with your Browser
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 31 |
Imagine Word, but as an ajax browser application that was free. And allowed tagging of documents. And you could set reader permissions for each document you create and allow others to edit the document, or just read it. That’s what is. pointed it out to me this evening during a long Google Talk chat. It is a very functional word processor with most of the bells and whistles you’d expect – a range of fonts and styles, embedded images (up to 2 megs each), spell checker, etc. It has a fantastic wysiwyg editor. It also has an option to upload and/or save in Word format. So the Writely guys and gals built the core feature set with an ajax UI, and then they went a step further and added some cool web 2.0 stuff. In addition to naming a document, you can allow others to edit it, or allow them read-only status. Documents can also be tagged for easy searches later – a nice touch. Writely is also completely free during its beta stage. In many ways, this is a wiki with a nice wysiwyg front end (I keep thinking of ), plus the ability to set permissions. However, it is also more than that Writely is a highly specialized niche application built with ajax. Ajax allows this (and other applications) to act very much like desktop apps. Stuff like this must get Microsoft’s attention…How long will it be before a becomes available? If all you need is a browser to open and edit these documents, the huge network effect enjoyed by Microsoft Office could simply vanish. For more information on Writely, see their blog and .
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Profile – YouTube
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 8 |
YouTube is very much like flickr ( ), but for videos. You can upload videos in a number of different formats ( .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG ). Videos can be of any length, but must be less than 100 mb in total size. Editorial restrictions consist of no “nudity and your video must be appropriate for all audiences.” ( ). For additional requirements, see their page. The service is completely free to users (publishers and viewers). YouTube converts video to a flash format, and therefore upload and playback is extremely fast. In our tests, videos uploaded significantly faster than in other services. YouTube is also a sharing network. You can add friends who are also member of the network, and email any video to anyone. YouTube also provides easy to use copy/paste code for emailing and posting on a website. You can also tag your videos, which results in bunching in a very similar way as flickr. Overall, the service is excellent. The service has recently been launched but seems to have quite a few users who have posted lots of content. Our absolute favorite is . It shows an ex-programmer who’s travelling the world and dancing at famous locations – it’s awesome and very popular on the site. Other favorites are and (that’s me in the red shirt. ok, not) (how do people do this?). I suspect YouTube will be quickly acquired and/or duplicated. We love it.
, , , , (note the comments), ,
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Update – Indeed (Raised Money)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 8 |
from the New York Times, and Allen & Company. This comes on the heals of Simply Hired’s last week ( ). Congratulations Indeed! The money aside, a strategic partnership with the NYT is absolutely tremendous. (Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham) and Allen & Co. is also worth more than the money they’ve raised. This really is very important news. My bet is the Simply Hired guys are not enjoying their day. NEW YORK, Aug. 8, 2005 – The New York Times Company announced today an
investment in Indeed, Inc. (www.indeed.com), a search engine for jobs
that enables job seekers to search millions of job listings from over a
thousand Web sites. The Times Company, Union Square Ventures and Allen
& Company, LLC are together investing $5 million for a minority interest. “We are pleased to join Union Square Ventures and Allen & Company in
backing Indeed, an innovative new firm that provides compelling job
search capabilities to Internet users,” said Martin Nisenholtz, senior
vice president, digital operations. “The Times Company has strong
help-wanted franchises in print and online, and we believe it is
important to invest in new technologies and services in this advertising
category.” Indeed is the most comprehensive search engine for jobs, adding over
110,000 new jobs per day – more than any other job search engine.
Indeed includes jobs from over one thousand unique sources, encompassing
company career pages, major and niche job boards, national and regional
newspapers, and hundreds of associations. Indeed indexes all new jobs
from each source every day, making it the freshest and most accurate
source of jobs on the Web. “Our relationship with The New York Times Company, Union Square Ventures
and Allen & Company will help us extend our lead as the number one
search engine for jobs,” said Paul Forster, CEO and co-founder of
Indeed. “We look forward to working with our new partners in our goal
of revolutionizing job search.” The New York Times Company’s highly successful Web sites – which include
NYTimes.com, About.com, Boston.com and 35 other Web sites – are visited
by more than 31 million users each month, and include the leading
Internet sites owned by a news organization. The Times Company is the
11th largest corporate online network. NYTimes.com alone generated 472
million page views in June.
The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT), a leading media company with
2004 revenues of $3.3 billion, includes The New York Times, the
International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, 16 other newspapers,
eight network-affiliated television stations, two New York City radio
stations and 35 Web sites, including NYTimes.com, Boston.com and
About.com. For the fifth consecutive year, the Company was ranked No. 1
in the publishing industry in Fortune’s 2005 list of America’s Most
Admired Companies. The Company’s core purpose is to enhance society by
creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and
entertainment.
Indeed is a search engine for jobs – with a radically different approach
to job search. In one simple search, Indeed gives job seekers free
access to millions of employment opportunities from over a thousand
sources, including company Web sites, job boards, newspapers and
associations. With the familiar look and feel of general search
engines, Indeed makes it easy for job seekers to drill down by keyword
and location to jobs that fit their requirements precisely. Job seekers
may also save their searches as email alerts or RSS feeds. Indeed.com
was selected by Time magazine as one of the 50 Coolest Web sites for
2005. Indeed is a privately held company based in Stamford,
Connecticut, founded by Paul Forster and Rony Kahan. For more
information, please visit http://www.indeed.com. # # #
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XMHD (Gmail Hard Drive)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 1 |
XMHD is a service that allows you to use a Google Gmail account as a virtual hard drive. If you don’t have a gmail account (which requires an invitation), don’t worry. They’ll invite you. XMHD is similar to , which we profiled yesterday. However, whereas Gmail Drive is an actual virtual drive on your Windows machine (and only windows), XMHD runs everything on its website and is therefore platform independent. All you need is a web browser and a gmail account to use it. There is also no account registration or download. Simply give it your gmail credentials and it logs into the gmail account for you and shows you its own front end. In their own words, You can easily add files from your hard drive (or other connected drive). You can upload up to 10 files at a time. Files are compressed and stored in a proprietary .xmhd format, but can be double clicked and opened in their original format from the site (and saved, edited, etc.). There is also a cool “fling it” feature that emails a file to any gmail contact stored in the gmail account. If the person doens’t have a gmail account, they will have to get one and use xmhd to open the file. All of this is a bit of a hassle for email recipients – and although XMHD says that their file format is necessary for compression purposes (and therefore you can store more data on your gmail account), it is also a nice viral touch to the service because recipients of your file must log in to XMHD to view them. You can always of course, simply email your files directly as well, so its not a big deal and it is a nice feature. We also like the upcoming RSS feed into your XMHD:
Overall its a great service, completely free, and just a bit better than Gmail Drive due to its cross-platform nature and “fling it” service.
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Profile – Blinksale
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 6 |
Want an easier way to manage invoices? is for you. And even if invoices aren’t a problem for you, take a minute and check out their site. It is visually and functionally . It oozes AJAX and Rails, and thoughtful, creative design. That’s not surprising, since a design company specializing in AJAX, , created the site. But it is also wonderfully easy to use – the features are not just there to visually impress. I love it, and I never send invoices. Blinksale tackles a simple need in a straightforward way. Invoices are always a hassle for small businesses. You either need to hack up a Word or Excel document and forward it, or use expensive accounting software. Some people just send text invoices in email. It’s not very pretty, and unless you are using accounting software there are few or no tools to help you follow up and manage invoices after they are sent. Blinksale solves all of this. First, it takes moments to create and send a very professional invoice. I literally registered a new account, created a faux invoice and sent it to my partner at Archimedes Ventures, Keith Teare, in about 5 minutes (I billed him $25,000 for “services” – let’s see if the deadbeat pays). Blinksale currently supports 160 currencies. You can include your in the invoice and be paid by that method, if you can do business with paypal (in my opinion the world is divided firmly into two types of people: people who’ve used paypal for one year or less, and people who’ve been ripped off by paypal and subsequently have been ignored and/or berated by paypal “customer service”). By the way, after registration, blinksale creates a unique home page for you – ours is techcrunch.blinksale.com. After creating an invoice, there are a number of management tools at your disposal. First, Mac users can sync their invoices with iCal. For the rest of us, an xml feed is available and you can subscribe to invoices via RSS. and notes can be sent to clients. Paid invoices can be marked as paid and closed out. Blinksale has a number of , ranging from free to $29/month. The paid plans all have a 30 day free trial, and there is no minimum period (and no refunds for termination before the end of a month). The paid plans allow for customized templates (using CSS), more users, more invoices, more clients, etc. Put simply, receiving payment for services performed or goods sold is why most of us work. While many small business owners, contractors, and freelancers enjoy the work they perform, most of us would rather be skiing. Or on a lake. Or in front of a 60-inch plasma TV. We work so we can get paid. And if we get paid enough, perhaps we won’t have to work as much. Getting paid for your services should be easy, painless, and quick. This is why we created Blinksale. For futher reading, the Blinksale blog is , and the Firewheel Design blog is . See also , which is a competitor. , , , (Interview with founder Josh Williams), , , (excellent review), , , , , , , , ,
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Meetro
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 1 |
Wired published an on Meetro today. Meetro is an instant messaging service that works both as a stand alone client and also integrates with other IM services (AOL and ICQ for now, others to come later). Meetro determines where you are phyically located automatically (or you can override by telling it manually) and shows you other meetro users near you. It’s a cool way to see when your friends are nearby, and to meet random people who are physically close to you. Meetro currently only works on the Windows platform, with Mac and other clients coming in Q4. The download is small – 3.5 mb, and registration was very simple. Overall, the service works very well. I chatted with two of the founders (Wendell and Paul) and also asked a couple of random people near me what they thought of it – everyone was very enthusiastic and loved the service. This is an application that will stay on my desktop. It will become increasingly useful as they integrate additional IM platforms, as I run five on my desktop currently (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Skype, Gizmo).
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Profile – YorZ
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 6 |
YorZ (pronounced “Y” “or” “Z”, but the founders about it) is a job referral site that pays bounties to people who refer the person who becomes employed. It is very early stage but nevertheless has an interesting business model and a of founders and employees. I spoke with the two founders today, Brian Goler and Kevin Berk, and got a very good feel for their business. Additional features are promised soon. YorZ allows companies to post jobs (with or without a bounty), people to refer others for jobs, and people to apply directly for jobs. Their listings are available on their site, and they also syndicate listings out to , and other job posting aggregators. Employers pay a $10 fee per listing, althought that fee is waived if the employer chooses to pay a success-based bounty of $50 or more. The bounty, which is paid only if an employee is successfully sourced through YorZ and begins working, is paid directly to YorZ, which then distributes it out to the referrer or referrers of that candidate. The employer is asked to leave feedback (on a scale of 1-5) of referrers and candidates. YorZ syndicates their listings out to various free aggregators, and will also post the listings on paid sites such as Monster on behalf of the employer (passing on the fees). People who want to refer jobs to others have a couple of tools to use. They can send emails directly to the company and/or the person being referred or they can set up a “ ” on their website. The Bounty Roll is a widget that you install on any web page that lists job postings according to filters you set, such as keyword, bounty size, location, etc. You can also choose the number of listings to be shows, from 1-10. YorZ creates an easy to use html snippet for you to use, based on your parameters. If there are any successful hires through your Bounty Roll links, you get paid the bounty (suggestion: add a search box to the Bounty Roll) Bounties are paid if a person you referred first takes a job and begins working. If your email is forwarded (creating a ), the last six referrers share the bounty equally. If you are paid bounties of $600 or more in a calendar year, YorZ will submit a form 1099 to the IRS. Applicants can apply directly for a job, of course. If there is no referrer, YorZ keeps the bounty for themselves. YorZ is a great idea and could get traction. The service is naturally viral (emails to people you refer as well as the Bounty Roll). We also like that they have RSS feeds and email alerts for all categories and search results. Their competitors include , and . Brian Goler – Co-Founder
Kevin Berk – Co-Founder
Brian Guan – Lead Architect
, (comparing YorZ to Jobster), (co-founder’s blog, and a good place to see an example of a bounty roll on the right)
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Update – AttentionTrust
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 6 |
(TechCrunch ) has started to approve websites, and Steve was nice enough to send our’s today. Your application for the AttentionTrust has been accepted. Your name will now appear on the list of supporters on www.attentiontrust.org. Please use the HTML code below to display the AttentionTrust badge on your site. ——————————————————————————- ——————————————————————————- Thank you,
Steve Gillmor, President
AttentionTrust.org , we continue to look forward to, and supporting, developments around the Attention idea. Update: See Stowe Boyd’s “ “
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Kahuna (Hotmail Beta) – extreme marketing, new teasers
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 24 |
I am a little bit annoyed right now. Sometimes people get a little too cute. Microsoft’s Kahuna may be falling into that category. I’m pretty excited about Kahuna because I love ajax and this is going to be one cool ajax application. It looks like (and should be) the new version of Hotmail will act very much like a desktop application. I like that. I want to try it out, and blog about it. And although I don’t always get an invitation to participate in a beta, I usually don’t have to waste a lot of time getting to an answer. Kahuna is offering beta invites, but require you to read through team member blogs to find out the answers to questions. If you find the answer, you get another hint. Here’s a recent post by , the Kahuna Program Manager: The mail team wants to invite a few more beta testers into the mail beta, but simply adding people is just too easy… so we put together a small treasure hunt: One of our team members made a post about the origin of the product’s code name, locate his space for your next hint. WTF? This is stupid. This is not time well spent. This does nothing to build a brand or make me a loyal user. It suceeds only in pissing me off. I’d much rather use this time either testing Kahuna (and most likely writing amazing things about it), or testing something else (there are lots of other profiles on my to-do list). So, do you guys agree and consider it kind of lame to waste our time like this? Or am I wrong and this treasure hunt is an example of hip, cool, edgey and/or extreme marketing (marketing 2.0)? I am now done with this particular gripe. Back to Kahuna, Imran has posted additional screen shots and information on the service. He had a where he stated 2 of his top 5 reasons for liking Kahuna. Today he (leaving us in suspense for #5), along with a new screen shot of Kahuna (see to left):
I’m sure the power users will love this. Use “[“ and “]” to navigate the message list and read your messages without using the mouse at all. Combine these with the preview pane and the delete key shortcut to delete messages and you can cruise through your inbox in no time flat. To read a message, click Enter to open a message in a larger view and click Esc to return to your message list. Also, “control [” and “control ]” will allow you to move between mail folders.
Do you get a lot of mails in a variety languages? If the mail itself does not specify the encoding Hotmail calculates the encoding by analyzing the message. You can choose the correct encoding if mail beta’s automatic choice was wrong so your messages look right regardless of the sending language or encoding. It really does look like Kahuna will be user friendly and fast. Looking forward to future posts on this.
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Google Talk Live, Functional
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 23 |
There’s been blog chatter all day about . I didn’t write about it because I couldn’t use it (it hadn’t launched yet) and I certainly wasn’t “breaking” the story. Not only that, it seems to me that Skype already has a quite nice and functional application to do this type of thing. made me sort of think things had gotten a little out of hand. But I couldn’t resist, of course. The second the client was available for download I jumped to the site and took the plunge. Google Talk works and it looks and sounds cool. It’s now the 15th IM client on my desktop – MSN, meetro, Yahoo, Skype, Gizmo, AIM, … You don’t have to download Google’s software to use the service. You can use any Jabber/XMPP . puts it well: One advantage to Google Talk could be its ability to connect with users of competing services. Google Talk is based on the Jabber open-source standard, which allows consumers to connect with other messaging systems that work with Jabber, such as Apple Computer’s iChat, GAIM, Adium, Trillian Pro and Psi. Google Talk has a nice interface, works quickly and is generally a great product. Here’s the key features: Here’s what it lacks: So try it out and feel free to add us (techcrunch is our username). Keith Teare, my partner at Archimedes Ventures, is thinking that Google is very obviously dripping out features and products that Microsoft is including in Vista. He wrote to me, using Google Talk: keith.teare: “It’s almost as if Google is implementing the features Microsoft has announced for Longhorn – Sidebar; voice calls inside IM, RSS integration – but doing it ahead of Microsoft, by about 12 months. A Google layer between Users and the OS. Rendering the OS a commodity It reminds me of a on my weblog about 18 months ago” I agree with Keith 100% on this one (a first). (very nice review), , , , , (I love this blog – guess why),
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Hula – (possibly) a New Ajax Calendar
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 23 |
We just heard about a new online calendar application called Hula that’s ajax-based. It hasn’t launched and we can’t find the website for it, are linking to a couple of flash movies that show it in action. This reminds us of Apple’s iCal. The power of Ajax to make web apps work like desktop apps is awesome. I just hope it’s cheaper than , which is charging $40/year. Thanks to Ross in the comments area, we now have a link to . “Hula is a calendar and mail server whose goal is to be fun and easy to use, while scaling effortlessly from small groups to large organizations with thousands of members. Hula is an open source project led by .”
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Update – Del.icio.us (search & recommend)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 15 |
, a social bookmarking service (see previous profiles above), launched two new important features recently – and . Both of these features are much needed tools to help users find tagged URIs. These tools will greatly assist users in researching related tags and to find good, related content to stuff they are interested in. Josh a few days ago: We’ve released the new recommendation engine. If you have more than ten urls saved in a tag, you will be offered several urls as well as other people’s tags that the system thinks you will be interested in. The URL pages also now offer the chance to see other related URLs. If you are on a particular del.icio.us user page (del.icio.us/username/tag), there is a link to see “recommended” tags that other people have used. This information is extremely useful in researching specific tags and how other people are tagging similar URIs. Related URL’s are also recommended in the URL page of a bookmark. (good screen shots), and also write about this. a few hours ago: I’ve released a simple implementation of search across all users. If you are logged in, hit “search” and then be sure you check off “entire site.” This has been a badly needed service and have tried to fill the void while Josh built it. There is now a search bar at the top of your personal Del.icio.us page (you must be logged in), and you can search your own tags or click “search entire site” and get tag results across all users. I’ve tested it out and it works very well. I’m not sure if the new search feature allows searching of multiple tags – an attempt gave me an internal server error. This is an important feature to be able to filter results accross multiple tags. I’m hoping he adds a feed link for results in the very near future.
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Profile – Pheedo
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 12 |
is a network that brings advertisers to blogs. I spoke with , Pheedo’s Chief Marketing Officer, earlier this week to get a better understanding of the business. Bill joined Pheedo as part of their . Advertisements are inserted into feeds and/or the blog itself. Today, ads are text-based, with graphical ads being rolled out in the near future. 11,000 blogs are currently part of the Pheedo network, some of which are very large. Pheedo classifies blogs as “premium” or as part of a category (basically a group of similar blogs). Traffic is one metric for determining if a blog is “premium” or not, but Bill emphasized that it is not the only factor. Many of their smallest publishers, serving a specific niche, get the best performance, he said. Advertisers can target specific blogs and/or categories (topic based). Bloggers have control over whether or not they allow a specific advertiser to place ads on in their feeds and/or on their blogs. Pheedo started as a simple idea to help thousands of bloggers, micro-publishers and large media outlets in need of a flexible advertising solution. Our aim is to provide publishers and advertisers alike the tools needed capitalize on the business opportunities surrounding weblogs and syndicated content feeds. We are rethinking online advertising and delivering new tools to address the opportunities and challenges of this 100% opt-in, consumer-controlled, syndicated content and blog medium. We are excited to deliver the service you expect. And most importantly, your feedback is always welcome. For bloggers, getting set up through Pheedo is relatively simple. They will set up a new feed URL for you. Alternatively, if you have a current feed with subscribers, they have tools to assist you in redirecting the URL to flow through Pheedo. There are no minimum traffic requirements to work with them. Advertisements are generally priced on a cpc (cost per click) basis. Advertisers also have a choice of offering a sponsorship – which is a set price on a blog or category to have an advertisement shown for a specific period of time. Click through rates on feeds is fairly high – 5-15% on average according to Bill. See their comparing feed click through rates to email marketing. Pheedo currently serves their own ads, and uses Kanoodle to back-fill unsold inventory. Pheedo gives 65% of advertising revenue to the blog publisher. , President | COO
, Chief Technology Officer
, Chief Marketing Officer
Pheedo has 30 employees worldwide, including . Their corporate blog is . (compares Pheedo to other solutions for generating advertising revenue for blogs),
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Profile – Consumating
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 13 |
is dating 2.0. Yes, it’s . They also use a bit of Ajax in their interface. After registering (it’s free), you create an online profile. The key difference between this and other dating sites is that you write tags for what you are looking for, and how you describe yourself. I registered (purely for research purposes, of course :-)), and used a number of fetching tags to describe myself, such as “web 2.0” and “RSS” (hey, I am who I am). My profile can be viewed : I am…
TechCrunch is a 34-year old boy located in Palo Alto, CA who is taken and looking for for friends, and consumating fun! Popularity
1 people would do TechCrunch, and 0 people would not, which means TechCrunch is ranked 1512th amongst all consumating users. Once you are a member there are a number of interesting features. You can add people to your hotlist, or just say “you’d do them” or “you wouldn’t do them”. They do tend to get to the point. They have a recommendation engine that takes your reviews and recommends other people you might like as well. Consumating also has a nice sense of humor to help offset the brutal effects of honest tagging and comments. For instance, they refer to everyone you might meet on their site as “prospective ex-partners”. Nice. You can also add tags for other people, and leave comments. Of course, you can send private messages to people as well. This uses up points, and I’m not entirely clear how to get them back. I’ve pinged the founders and will hopefully have more information soon. From their information:
Consumating was created by Ben Brown and Adam Mathes. It began its life as a joke about online dating, but when people started using it to actually find dates, we got serious. We are the first dating site to use the ideas of taxonomy and user-created tags to help people find one another. We use a lot of Ajax. Many thanks to our friends at Mule Design and Lane Becker of adaptive path for their enormous amount of help and support. You can contact us by sending an e-mail to [email protected]. Consumating can power a co-branded personals site for you. If you’re interested in having personals.yoursite.com, e-mail [email protected]. Given our competitiveness, we hope you’ll sign up and give the thumbs up to Techcrunch. Email me if you do and I’ll send the first 5 a TechCrunch Tshirt or bumper sticker, your choice.
, , (mentions consummating in one of the best and most comprehensive tagging essays written), , , , , (calls consumating “facebook for the rest of us”), In a mail exchange with Ben Brown, he sent me the following information: Hey. You got most of the answers to these right. The site started in 2002, I think, but we ran it as a joke called Uber Personals. It didn’t have tags or anything like that – it was just snarky profiles and a basic search engine. I decided to make a run for the money in early 2005 and rebuild the software into a more modern application and add some of the more game-like elements because a) I was interested in the technology and b) I thought dating sites needed a kick in the patoot. So far, so good.
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Profile – FeedCatch
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 13 |
Thanks to who pointed me to ‘s new . FeedCatch is a nice little tool that allows you to take any feed and archive posts indefinetely (or less so if you set the parameters to do so). there are a number of default options, including: It takes just a few seconds to set up a feed and choose the parameters for archiving. Headlines and some summary text are shown. Note that you can use the FeedShake service to create a merged/sorted/filtered feed from multiple feeds, and then archive everything using FeedCatch. Check it out. The service is free and requires no registration. The TechCrunch feed we created is . There is a bug report that is being worked on. Hopefully this will become stable (and therefore useful) sometime soon: 2005/08/06 08:30 GMT :: All items stored before this date are deleted to fix a bug. This may happen again so do not expect FeedCatch to store any stable data this week. ,
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TechCrunch on Slashdot
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 14 |
Our was “ ” today. I was wondering why traffic spiked 4x this morning. Congrats to , and good luck with your servers. :-) Mercury News also picked up the YouTube profile on (Matt Marshall). YouTube is having a good PR day.
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Web 2.0 This Week (August 7-13)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 14 |
This has been a week of challenges and successes. Challenging because I am on a driving trip from Anacortes, WA to Los Angeles, and although you can now get , I have no tools for getting access in a car, or dealing with sun glare. Successful because we’ve met and profiled some great new companies (see no. 1 below), and have had to our site. Thank you to everyone who visits our site or reads our feed. Here’s this week’s summary. For additional web 2.0 information, thinking and reporting, I highly recommend Web 2.0 Weekly Wrapup. Check out this week’s wrapup . (raises money), , , (raises money), (firefox version released), (new product releases), (new feature), , , Dave Sifry and Technorati further updated their March State of the Blogosphere data (see for Parts 1-3) with information about and . “[T]he most influential media sites on the web are still well-funded mainstream media sites, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. However, a lot of bloggers are achieving a significant amount of attention and influence. Blogs like bOingbOing, Daily Kos, and Instapundit are highly influential, especially among technology and political thought leaders, and sites like Gizmodo and Engadget are seeing as much influence as mainstream media sites like the LA Times.” For other news/gossip on Technorati, see our post . Also, see Susan Mernit, saying “ .” Comscore published a on August 8 with some seriously contentious data. It was on August 9, and everyone’s been buzzing about it this week. Comments include “Clearly the data is way off” (see the comments to ), “ ” (Jason Calcanis), “ ” (Jeff Jarvis – this is my personal favorite quote), “ ” (Nick Denton) and “ ” (Fred Wilson in a follow up post). You gotta love the two way web. From the on August 10, 2005: I’m proud to say we’ve acquired some fuel for our little enterprise from a great group of folks. Leading the deal was Charles River Ventures, featuring George Zachary. Noah and I were introduced to George by our mutual friend James Hong back in March. George has an awesome track record and a great reputation, and we got along well. Before and after meeting George, we took many other trips to Sand Hill Road earlier this year, meeting with many other firms. We also did a lot of deep thinking and soul searching about what we were really trying to do with Odeo, which is a crucial part of the company-building/money-raising process. And we ended up doing a deal we’re really happy about. In addition to Charles River’s involvement, we included another small firm, Amicus Ventures, and a substantial group of individuals (both in number and weight) in the funding round: Mitch Kapor, Joe Kraus, Tim O’Reilly, Ron Conway, Josh Kopelman, Don Hutchinson, Dave Pell, Mike Maples, Francesco Caio, Barbara Poggiali, Emanuele Angelidis, James Hong, and Ed Zschau. Ariel Poler, who’s helped build a number of successful Internet companies, is also on our board and an investor. See ‘s and ‘s (“BitTorrent: VC’s Wanted – If podcasting is getting millions, BitTorrent deserves more”) thoughts on this (and bittorent) as well. Here’s Om: If those companies can snag millions, then Bit Torrent is definitely worth a lot more. Let me put it in the old world terms. The podcast start-ups of today are like Wine.com, while Bit Torrent is Cisco of the digital content revolution. It has actual technology that will help grow the open media. It has the technology that will help distribute the “video content�? next generation bloggers will create or whatever. It is infrastructure – and we know who makes all the money. That explains the cat who licked the cream smile on Navin’s face. In an interview by Debbie Weil, Steve Rubel he gets up at 4:30 or 5 AM every morning so that he can”pick the best stuff and get it up on the blog early so it can reach European readers”. I find it hard to get out of bed earlier than 9 in the morning (something complains about constantly). I’m not lazy. It’s genetic. Seriously. If I tried to get up at 4:30 AM in order to get an early start to my blogging day, I’d be surprised if I could actually get my computer turned on. Steve, Europe is all yours. :-) From . Seth is publishing a new book, , and he’s thought up a . He’s allowing a small group of people to pre-order 50 galley versions of his book for $2 each, if they promise to give away copies to sneezers (if you don’t know what a sneezer is, read one of his books – I’m a sneezer, and so are most other bloggers and blog readers). I’ve put in my order, and will give them out to people for free on my site. More on this as it develops. ZDNet Uk, a sister publication to CNET, issues an apology for the CNET on Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. In the article, they claim they spent 30 minutes on Google finding some very personal information on Mr. Schmidt. Google by blacklisting CNET for a year – “Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues.” This all happened last week, but the ZDNet “apology” is a classic: [W]e cannot avoid responsibilities for our own actions. Acting under the mistaken impression that Google’s search engine was intended to help research public data, we have in the past enthusiastically abused the system to conduct exactly the kind of journalism that Google finds so objectionable. Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts, let alone in capriciously using them to illustrate areas of concern. We apologise unreservedly, and will cooperate fully in helping Google change people’s perceptions of its role just as soon as it feels capable of communicating to us how it wishes that role to be seen. Unfortunately, we have been unable to ascertain this. Google UK has told us that we’ll have to talk to Google US to find out whether we too have fallen under the writ of excommunication. As we share all information with our American brethren it is hard to see how it could be any other way, but we humbly await news of our fate. As I said above, you gotta love the two way web. And British humor. From . writes: Reflecting on the staggering impact NSCP, VRSN, YHOO, and AMZN have had on our lives, economies, and careers reinforces the promise and excitement of innovation, while reminding us how hard it is to appreciate non-linear developments, and harder still to foresee their ultimate impact. As investors and technologists, let’s all hope that 1995 is a spring board for changes still to come, and let’s us also hope that we have the foresight to recognize “it” when/if we see it. Will, good post. It’s here, now, and I’m betting you are one of the ones who sees it. writes: Because your blog will be your avatar in virtual reality. And you can’t play in virtual reality without an avatar. So you’re gonna need a blog, baby. When you blog today, you are participating in a Massively Multiplayer Online Conversation (MMOC). Today’s text blogs are like the text-based MUD games of yesteryear. These MUDs eventually grew up to become today’s 3-d MMOGs. And inna future, blogs will grow up from text to audio to video. And blogs will come to resemble the avatars in today’s MMOGs. Donald Trump launches a , but it (he, or his people, are editing comments).
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Measure Map is Coming
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 22 |
I just heard a very juicy rumor (some already on Technorati about this) that Adaptive Path is coming out with a very cool new Ajax application called . The site is taking registration requests now. People who are participating in the alpha are drooling. It’s apparently a blog analytics tool that crushes everything else out there. I also heard a few other things about it but am sworn to secrecy. I’m looking forward to seeing this first hand.
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The Personal Bee – A Better Way to Read News
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 22 |
There’s something I’ve been griping about for a long time (most recently to on the first evening of ): I read hundreds of feeds every day (320 as of today), and it takes frickin forever to go through it all. in a massive number of posts from hundreds of feeds than clicking on each feed and screening it yourself. And I know what it is. My idea? Automate the process, and return the results visually. A is a perfect way to do this. Imagine if all of your unread feeds were scanned, keywords and/or tags were analyzed, and a tag cloud was created where you could see words with font size and boldness determined by how prominent they were in the posts. That way, you could just click on what you want to read, and ignore the fluff. This appears to be what (note: this site is down quite often) is experimenting with. Created by as a side project from his day job, Personal Bee has this to say about itself: The Personal Bee is a “discovery engine” that helps you discover information from a collection of RSS feeds. In contrast, client-based RSS readers and web-based RSS aggregators merely catalog your RSS feeds. These tools are adequate if you subscribe to fewer than 5-10 news sources per topic of interest. Compared to RSS search engines, the Bee captures the latest “buzz words” in a topic area without requiring you to pre-specify search terms. Adam Marsh tells me that Nicholas presented at Bar Camp, although I was not present at the session (thanks for passing this on Adam). I wish I was there. Personal Bee has a number of public feeds (see for instance), and you can also register and create your own private or public feeds. As you can see from the screenshot, a tag cloud is placed prominently in the left sidebar. Things like “Feedster 500” and “Pandora” are big – things I want to click on right away. When I do click on a word in the tag cloud, the relevant content is pulled. Bloglines, Pluck, Rojo, Attensa, NewsGator, and others: Please note this application, and listen to your power users. There is a better way to show new data, and it is so easy to implement. I’ll be playing around with this application a lot in the near future.
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Web 2.0 This Week (August 14-20)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 22 |
It’s late on Sunday night and I have so much to write about – this last week was absolutely amazing. I met so many interesting people at and added their blogs to my reader. I am now reading over 320 blogs and loving the Internet more than ever. I’m tired, but full of energy! This week’s summary is below. As I’ve mentioned before, as well that takes a different angle than us. I highly recommend subscribing to his blog. I also want to point quickly to , the creators of . Nice blog! There’s some good stuff going on over there. If you are serious about Web 2.0, you’ll also want to subscribe to ‘s site. He doesn’t write often, but . (Update), , , , , , (Update), , , (Update), , , Last Monday Nielsen called “Understanding the Blogosphere”. Key stats from the study: For another study published this week (on tagging), see Smart Mobs post and Libary Stuff’s post . PDF . , , , , , , I really loved his books (my favorite was ). I like to think that Mr. Thompson would be very much a blogger if he was still writing today (that’s my web 2.0 angle for this). He requested, and received, a spectacular funeral that involved . I wish I could have been there. Robert Scoble met with Plaxo last week and about it. I was in a cranky mood that day and got into it with Plaxo employees in the . I regret writing those comments, and I plan on profiling the positive aspects of the service sometime this week. By the way, shortly after this post (although I forgot to ask Robert what the actual catalyst was), Robert to the “mudpit”. Since I’ve segued into talking about Robert Scoble, see his brilliant posts and as well. :-) Mark Cuban that Google’s Blogger is creating huge blog spam problems for his IceRocket search engine and the blogosphere in general: What makes the problem particularly frustrating is that it doesnt cost anything to setup a blog on what is probably the most common blog host, blogger.com from Google. Its fast, its easy, its free and it can be automated. So blogs are coming at us left and right. We are killing off thousands a day, but they keep on coming. Like Zombies. Its straight from Night of the Living Dead. Brain dead splogs. Coming at us by the thousands. Blogger is by far the worst offender. Google seems to be working hard to adjust their relevancy indexes to exclude splog from having influence on search rankings, but they dont seem to be doing anything more than removing reported splogs. Kind of like going after the zombies one at a time with a shovel. Can we get some help on this Google ? (you can check out weblogs.com to get a feel for just how much splog we are talking about ) (great guy, I met him yesterday at Dave Winer’s OPML Editor Road Show),
(I love IceRocket’s new ) Scott Rafer at announced the on August 15 (wiki ). What makes the list so great isn’t the list itself, but rather the fact that he is so open to and . Nice one, Scott (and Feedster). See for additional posts. , , , , Brian Benzinger, who has a terrific up and coming blog called , goes the trouble of writing a great list of . Congratulations on the Brian! Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s new book is . (this link also gives affiliate credit to Robert and Shel). If you haven’t read all about the guy yet, read and (multiple posts in second link) to get started. Bad Fedex. Good Stanford Law School (who is defending him). Dave Winer and Adam Curry have been . Happy Anniversary!
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Pandora to launch next week
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 8 | 25 |
‘s founder, Tim Westergren, sent an email out to all beta testers announcing that Pandora will go live next week, and extending the free trial period for beta testers to September 28. Pandora has had an overwhelmingly positive blogger response to their beta. I assume the general launch will be well received as well. Our previous profile on Pandora on August 20, 2005 is . The text of the email is below: Hello, I first want to say thanks very much for participating in our friends & family preview. It has been a very exciting and gratifying few weeks for all us here at Pandora. Since we launched the beta site last month, we’ve seen tremendous interest in the service – one user even went so far as to call Pandora ‘the best reason for the web to exist’. Most importantly, you’ve given us a ton of great feedback on how we can improve the service. Thanks for all your time and effort. We’re launching the site to the general public next week. Based on your feedback, this new version will include a ‘station history’ feature which allows users to see what’s played and go back and rate a song or buy it on iTunes/Amazon after it has played. We’ve also made it easier to share stations and have made some improvements to the user interface. You’ve also contributed to a long list of great ideas going forward which we can’t wait to add. To thank you for participating in the preview, you will be able to use Pandora for free through September 28th. To log in, use your username, which is your email address, and password. (New users will be able to use Pandora for free for a short period, then can subscribe to the service for $36 for one year of unlimited use). Thanks again for your help and encouragement! I sincerely hope you’ll stay with us as we start this exciting new phase for the company. Cheers. Tim Westergren
Founder
Pandora Media
(formerly Savage Beast Technologies, Inc.)
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Profile: Google Wallet
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 20 |
Google (Wallet) This hasn’t launched yet, but there is some buzz around the blogosphere (and the ) that Google is planning on launching a competing payment service to . Is this Web 2.0? I so. If its p2p, which I imagine it would be, then it certainly is. From the WSJ article: Google has a hill to climb – paypal has 72 million users (PayPal accounted for $233.1 million, or 23 percent, of eBay’s revenue during the first quarter). However, they’ve done this before with search (v. everyone), advertising (v. overture) and email, although not with a social network (see – when’s the last time you logged in?) Gary Price that the company “ ” was created by Google a couple of months ago: Gary also noted that someone registered “ “. More on this as it develops.
(saying the service will not be p2p, which really questions whether it should be on TechCrunch as a Web 2.0 play :-))
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Profile: Weblogs, Inc.
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 20 |
September 24, 2003 Weblogs, Inc.
2200 Colorado Avenue, Suite 729
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Phone: 310-828-8284
Fax: 310-861-0600 or Weblogs, Inc.
The Chrysler Building
132 East 43rd Street, Suite 1000
New York, New York 10017 The Weblogs, Inc. network of weblogs (WIN) is a blog network – literally an affiliation of weblogs that are each focused on a particular industry or topic. For instance, my favorite weblogs, inc. blogs are , , , and . There is a list to all weblogs, inc. blogs at the . In their own words:
Weblogs, Inc. is an add supported network (banner and adsense), with adsense revenues recently at $2,000 daily by , the co-founder. Weblogs, Inc. is the largest blog network, with over 80 blogs and 1,000 weekly posts covering 75 industries. ‘s is the second largest blog network ( , a Gawker blog, is one of my favorites). They also have a “best of” site/feed . Weblogs, Inc. has a terrific network of blogs that we read daily. We’re hoping they allow direct trackbacks again soon to become more “web 2.0″ish
Brian Alvey, CEO & Co-Founder
Jason Calacanis, Chairman & Co-Founder
(on trackback issue)
(on trackback issue)
(and iBLOGthere4iM)
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Profile: Technorati (New)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 20 |
Technorati fully launched their new beta with a slightly different look than the beta announced 10 days ago (profile ). Complete list of new features can be seen (Dave Sifry’s blog) and at the new Technorati corporate Blog ( ). I saw this earlier at the technorati site, and saw at The Blog Herald. The new site is great, adds lots of new features and we look forward to future improvements. It’s hard to say that I like it more or less than the “old” technorati – things grow on you and it takes time for new stuff to settle. But so far, I like it and the new feature set is strong. Relevant Links:
(doesn’t like the new look, makes good points about Google)
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Profile: BlogAds
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 18 |
BlogAds is an Ad network for big blogs, and only big blogs. From their site, you generally need at least 1,000 daily readers. From their FAQs: The ads are “skyscraper” format and can include images, text and a link. See the screen shots below for examples. Publishers choose the blog(s) that they would like to advertise on, based on price, length and subject matter. are not CPM or CPC based – rather the ad runs for a length of time in exchange for payment. Ads may run for 1 week, or 1-3 months. Prices currently range from $10 – $4500 per week. Most of the top blogs use blogAds:
(from April 28, 2005) And they seem to be making a reasonable amount of money: In fact, some blogs make the majority of their revenue from Blogads:
Overall, it is a great and popular advertising network for bloggers with very large audiences (this is not a long tail play, at least yet). Since CPM and CPC rates are not an issue, all a blog needs is a big and relevant audience to attract advertisers, and the money rolls in.
(shows nearly 80% of ad revenue from blogads)
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Profile: Digg
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 18 |
More recent profile of Digg . Digg is very early stage, sort of pre-beta. But its getting some buzz. Think of it as slashdot but potentially better. We first came accross it at and after checking out the service ourselves we were quite impressed. In their own words, Stories are first submitted by a user, along with a category. Other registered users will see the story and can “digg” it by clicking on a link. The more it is “digged”, the more popular it is and good things start to happen with the story. Once it has 15 diggs, it’s automatically moved up to the home page. As an example, we submitted our from a few days ago. A search of “vskype” on digg shows the story along with others . Users can choose to digg the story, blog on it, add comments, report it as spam, etc. Friends (and everyone else) can see what storied you digg by looking at the URL for your username. For instance, the stories that Techcrunch has “digged” are at . Stats for the user are also shown (and we are now determined to make ours outstanding) :-) There is also good, functional search: Everything is available via RSS, which is a necessary feature of course. Awesome! The current release is , including a new design and new features. Currently, the site is running slow but they are dealing with the scaling issue. Overall this is a very cool site and we are now behind it 100%. Hopefully the new release will have delicious-like toolbar options for easy post submitting. We’ll definitely be coming back for a look on !
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Profile: Celebrity Flicker
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 27 |
May 2005 Celebrity Flicker is a website that posts pictures of celebrities and related images (movie art, etc.). The site isn’t very deep and appears to focus on less-than-fully-dressed women, so it isn’t exactly an imdb.com replacement. However, it has a single interesting feature that makes it web 2.0 relevant – anonymous tagging by users. When you view a particular picture, tags that users have added appear next to the picture, along with an “Add Tag!” button: This is meaningful because it is one of the first experiments in anonymous user tagging of content on a site in order to relate one piece of content to other pieces. In the above screen shots, the user-generated tags next to the Trainspotting picture are: * heroin
* life
* choose
* actress
* macdonald
* kelly
* trainspotting Each of these tags link to other pictures that have been tagged identically by other users. This means that the site is using its users to make its content more easily findable. For instance, if you click on the “trainspotting” link, you get this page: Most results aren’t as relevant as this one though. A big issue with user tagging is generating real v. useless results. We’ll write more on this later in a post we are writing about the recently released Feedster anonymous tagging feature. With Delicious, users have a real incentive to tag properly – so that they can find the content again later via searching or browsing of their tags. With celebrity flicker that incentive is significantly less powerful and so the results are significantly less significant.
It means that if a web 2.0 service is going to add user tagging, especially user tagging, they better provide one heck of a good incentive for users to do it (see Delicious, Furl, etc.) or else they will get bad data. Publisher tagging is a different animal. As an example of publisher tagging, see the tags we’ve added to this post at the very end. This helps real-time search engines like technorati, pubub, feedster and others quickly index posts in a contextual way and relate it to similar content (which publishers want and so they have an incentive to do it and do it properly). Further, the links below allow readers of this post to click (in our case to technorati) to see similarly tagged content if they are interested in the subject. There is also an incentive by publishers to “spam”, however, which is a problem with publisher tagging.
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Profile: PostSecret
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 18 |
Germantown, Md. January 1, 2005 Postsecret is a weblog that asks people to submit 4-by-6-inch postcards that contain anonymous secrets. The postcards are scanned and placed on the website. PostSecret has thousands of daily visitors and a quick check of RSS reed subscriptions shows thousand of people get RSS feeds daily with new postcards. In their own words, It is a beautiful site and a wonderful idea.
“I wish I could give all these people on the site a hug and tell them it’s ok to be human.”
-Washington DC “Your site is truly inspirational, I’m left feeling full of compassion for my fellow human beings – We’re the same the world over.”
-England. “I cryed when i saw your site. Its truly amazing that so many people have so many secrets like mine. I wish i could just tell most of these people it will be ok, cause i myself have never had anyone tell ME that…and it would help.”
-West Virgina “So many of my secrets are there, without even sending a card.”
-Mexico
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Profile: Google Video
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 27 |
June 27, 2005. The service is now live. To use it, you must download their VLC client (about 1 mb) . Once it is installed, you can search for videos ( ), and videos that have an arrow icon next to them (see screen shots below) can be viewed by clicking on the icon. Non-free videos will eventually be integrated with the Google Payment Service (see profile ). A sample search with videos is . It works well, with little download time and few stops/starts with standard broadband. Uploading videos is a separate process.
(broke story)
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Google Video Launching Today?
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 27 |
The net is ablaze with stories that Google will release its video viewer today (uploads have been available since ). The viewer will be based on the open-source . We will profile this as soon as it becomes available. There is a at Google Video for the viewer, but an install on our Windows machine did not work properly. More on this as it develops. From the : (broke story)
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Plazes Profile
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 11 |
Plazes made an announcement at in Copenhagen on June 10, 2005, although the service has been around since at least January. In their own words, To gain full functionality, you must install a 1.11 mb file on your computer. I did this, and it had trouble syncing with my router. I’m not surprised, since my internet connection is down and I am currently “borrowing” wifi from one of my neighbors. Anyway, I was able to logon and create my very own (see the third screen shot below). This is a very useful application, and I can see using it to find friends and meet new people. The design is well thought out and the social networking tools are as good as we’ve seen. As indicates, the product is still in beta mode and functionality is being added continuously. – Discover Plazes anywhere in the world – like hotspots, restaurants, offices, based on search or your current location. – Hook up with people nearby – see people (and their “metadata”) who are online and near a “plaze”. Message with them. – Stay in touch with your friends – Plazes has social networking tools like invite, messaging, status, karma etc. Friends can see your currentl location (or keep yourself invisible)
“ ”
:-)
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FeedLounge Profile
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 11 |
The FeedLounge web-based RSS reader was announced on June 9, 2005. Feedlounge is the newest entrant into the increasingly crowded RSS Reader space. Feedlounge is web-based, like , , and , and has tagging (both feeds and posts), saving items indefinitely, and flagging items. Scott Sanders, one of the founders, writes in his that he created FeedLounge as a web-based application because he works from many different machines. Their goal was to create a thin-client-like experience, and the early alpha testers are coming back with : FeedLounge often feels much more like a desktop application than a web page. Clever combinations of Ajax and CSS add a ton of “hey wow” moments when using the system. As with Alex’s other works, the user interface is clean and easy to navigate.” – choice of layouts
– useful keyboard shortcuts
– OPML import support (export support later)
– Tagging (both of feeds and posts)
– Works only with Firefox, by design (a plus in TechCrunch’s view)
Alex King
Scott Sanders
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Technorati Beta Profile
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 11 |
(Public Beta Redesign) Technorati is Web 2.0 “old school”: one of the original (and best) real-time search engines. It requested customer feedback and has used it to launch an extensive redesign of their site as a public beta. The original site is still up at and the beta, for now, is at . Technorati claims to be indexing 800,000 + new posts daily, which is in line with competitor estimates of the size of the blogosphere. Technorati helped to increase the popularity of leveraging blog site metadata by allowing tag (or category) searches in their engine. By searching via tags, users can find content specifically tagged by the publisher (for now) under certain categories. The is the definitive list of popular bloggers on the web. The new UI has several key upgrades: – Simplified Interface
– RSS feeds for tag searches
– Tag searches return indexed results plus flickr, furl, delicious, and buzznet
– More homepage personalization – including watchlists, claimed blogs and profile information
– New Watchlist functionality
David L. Sifry -Founder and CEO
Adam Hertz – Vice President of Engineering
Joi Ito -Vice President of International Business and Mobile Devices
Teresa Malo – Chief Financial Officer
Richard Ault – Director of Product Marketing
Liz Westover – Director of Developer Relations
Tantek Çelik – Senior Technologist David L. Sifry
Kim Polese
Andreas Stavropoulous
Ryan McIntyre
Dan Beldy
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Weblogs, Inc. adds Spanish & Japanese sites
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 27 |
Previous Profile: June 20, 2005 ( ) Weblogs, Inc. has launched , and versions of it’s popular blog engadget.
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Profile: Yahoo My Web 2.0
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 29 |
June 29, 2005 MyWeb2.0 is a social search engine We’ve used and abused it for a day, and in our opinion it’s good – a bit like regular yahoo plus furl ( ). It was launched today as an early beta version “for a limited number of users.” There could be a cutoff, so it’s a good idea to sign up soon if you want an early look (what a great marketing idea). Once you sign up (you can use an existing yahoo account), you can do a number of things. If you want to bookmark web pages, we recommend downloading the yahoo toolbar, which will allow you to bookmark pages you are browsing. Otherwise, you can only bookmark pages found on normal Yahoo search. We don’t like toolbars very much because nearly half our screen is taken up with them, but if you want to use MyWeb2.0 it’s going to have to be a part of your life (and hey, maybe you already use the Yahoo toolbar). When you bookmark a page a popup appears that allows you to enter meta-data on the site, including title, notes, tags, access controls and a “save page” option (again, all of this looks and feels very much like furl: You can also invite friends (feel free to add us – [email protected]) (techcrunch was taken :-)), and see their bookmarked pages. The whole idea is that stuff that is relevant to your friends, could very well be relevant to you, too. This is user tagging in action (see our profiles on and for a discussion of the perils of this), but here you have real incentives (like delicious and furl) to do it properly – both to find stuff later and to share with your friends. Yes, it is yet another service to add friends and go to the trouble of bookmarking sites, but it does have in inport option (including RSS feeds) (yeah!) to decrease the burden. I imported my personal delicious page RSS feed and it seemed to work reasonably well. There’s a ton thats been written about this (see links below), so our recommendation is try read the reviews and try it out for yourself. Thanks, Yahoo, for launching this experiment in Web 2.0.
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Profile: Rainy Daze
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 29 |
Rainy Daze is NOT web 2.0. It screams web 1.0. But there is a reason why its here. I read an article today (referred from ) that was written by Troy Angrinon called “Shifting paradigms: The mental evolutionary process of moving from web 1.0 to web 2.0 in 17 steps” ( ) (and who, I note, writes with ( ). The article was originally an email to a friend, and Troy decided to post it to his blog. TechCrunch exists, partially, for similar reasons. We were being asked by friends about web 2.0 and the companies and products that define it, constantly, and so we decided to blog about them instead. Blogging about interesting stuff is just so much easier than having lots and lots of one-on-one conversations. Troy’s article reminded me of a post from last year by . It is a must read for any friends that ask you why blogging is different from geocities. I wrote about the article in my personal blog, adding a few things that I thought were important (how blogging is possible because of better software (Troy talks about this) and how they leverage the network effect). So why Rainy Daze? Last week Keith Teare and I were at Gnomedex, and staying up in town called Anacortes on an island north of Seattle. One evening at dinner we met a local couple (Keri and Jonathan) who were very nice and listened to us discuss the significance of that day’s and how it was important, important, to the evolution of the web. They were interested (really!?) and seemed to wanted to understand how all the new technology would affect them. And then they told us about Rainy Daze, a website they run from their home and where they sell hand made soaps and other bath stuff. I believe that someday soon, sites like Rainy Daze will incorporate web 2.0 features, probably from companies we’ve profiled or will profile here at Techcrunch. I also believe that it’s important to think about sites like these, because ultimately the stuff we are doing today will affect people’s lives. Rainy Daze has very cool stuff. In their own words, In 1999 we began making soap as gifts for friends and family. Because of the requests for replacements, we envisioned an opportunity for growth and fine-tuned our process in order to turn our hobby into a business. Soap making is the creative outlet that has brought inspiration into our lives and given us the opportunity to work with our hands. We are excited about our product line and absolutely love what we do!” I’ve bought some of their products (lots of their products actually) for my parents as a housewarming gift in their new home on the island. It’s awesome. I recommend you check it out. I imagine they will have a blog very soon to talk about what they are doing. I hope this post, and Troy’s essay linked above, will be helpful to them in doing so.
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Profile: Feedster
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 29 |
March 2003 Founded by Scott Johnson in March 2003. Merged with RSS-Search founded by François Schiettecatte in June 2003. Announced Series A funding on June 2, 2005 led by Selby Venture Partners. Other investors include Omidyar Network, members of the New York Angels, Kevin Hartz, co-founder of Xoom, Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite and Jotspot, Josh Kopelman, founder of Half.com, Scott Kurnit, founder of About.com, Mark Pincus, founder of Tribe.net and Support.com, and Narendra Rocherolle, founder of Webshots. Feedster, Inc.
116 New Montgomery Street
Suite 605
San Francisco, CA 94105
Voice: 415-348-9119
Email: [email protected] Feedster is one of the original real-time search engines, and has added interesting new services along the way to further evolve the web 2.0. The services we will profile are search, link search and their new user tagging feature. They also have a nascent RSS reader and other services (like “feedpaper” (which we just can’t figure out), job search, and feed search for sites. Most of these other features are available under and . In their own words, “Feedster is a rapidly growing Internet search engine and advertising network that provides timely and meaningful information to consumers and large Internet sites in need of targeted media. Feedster provides a fresh index across over 8 million feeds several times per hour, adding millions of new documents daily. Feedster benefits from the ways that blogging is changing the Internet’s basic building blocks – from unstructured web pages to structured documents.�? While attending the conference on search yesterday (we will post about this event separately), a lot of questions came up regarding “old search” v. “new search”. Old search (the gold standard is Google) prioritizes results based on “relevance”, which is largely determined based on links into the content. Lots of links = high relevance (this is simplified of course). With real-time search (blogging, news, etc.), link analysis breaks because there is not sufficient time for links to materialize and become indexed. Real-Time search engines like Feedster and Technorati (Profiles ) generally use “freshness” as the determining factor of relevance. The most recent post including your searched keyword or tag is placed first in the results. For Real-Time search to have its “ah-ha!” moment, these services must figure out a better way of adding relevance to results. This can be as simple as putting new content from highly linked blogs higher in search results (although this may tend to “lock in” older blogs), to creating highly complicated algorithms to determine relevancy of a given publisher to the particular content (so boingboing, the most popular blog, wouldn’t necessarily be given higher relevance if they posted on a new biotech company, something they don’t generally cover).
Feedster search is good but not as good as Technorati is today. The reasons: integration of publisher tags into technorati results, and the fact that Technorati adds delicious, furl, buzznet and delicious tags to their results (see for instance). Feedster doesn’t do this (yet?) and so the results aren’t as useful (same search at Feedster ). Feedster search is, however, quite useful and has a very clean interface (something Technorati is for). Feedster also has a toggle to show results by “Date” or “Relevance”, which is great, although relevance seems to be powered mostly by keyword counting at this point.
Feedster also has an excellent feature that shows link coming in to a particular URI. It’s useful for research and ego-searches, and generally to see who’s linking to what. The interface is very similar to general search. This is the really interesting new thing happening at Feedster. (note our editorial comments on the benefits and perils of user tagging in a recent profile of – in general, you need to find a really good incentive for users to tag (see Delicious and Furl) or you end up with bad results). Feedster tagging was announced by Scott Rafer, Feedster’s CEO, in a personal blog post on May 19, 2005 ( ). The idea is to add a “Tag this” button at the end of a blog post where users can tag the post as they wish. The code to add this is available (just do a view source on the page). You must be a feedster registered user and go through a captcha process to insert a tag. Here is the process visually (last one is the code needed to insert it into a blog):
This is an interesting and ongoing experiment with user tagging. However, currently the tagging results are useful for only one thing: viewing all tags for a post once you’ve added a tag. For now, the results are not integrated into Feedster search or anywhere else, and so there is almost no incentive for a user to tag content in any meaningful way. Thus, tags like “asshat” and “qrp2” appear within the results. Not good. I spoke to Scott Rafer about this issue yesterday and he says that they will roll out additional functionality in the future, including support for , the open source “delicious” bookmarking service. That will certainly help. But for now, the experiment shows that user tagging absulutely requires incentives or else users will not tag, and/or will not tag appropriately. We’ve added the “tag this” feature to this post as an experiment to see what kind of data is generated. Have at it! Management: Scott Rafer – President and CEO
Chris Redlitz – VP Sales and Marketing
J. Scott Johnson – Co-Founder & CTO
Fran̤ois Schiettecatte РCo-Founder & Chief Scientist
Oren Michels – VP Engineering
y
(read this for his thoughts on the tagging product)
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Profile: Flickr
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 16 |
Acquired by Yahoo in March 2005 – Flickr is one of the defining web 2.0 applications. You can upload photos. Lots of services do that. But what Flickr did as well was to allow sharing and tagging of photos, allowing for rich networking and sharing of pictures and, more importantly, . And, Flickr has the critical mass to have a massive . In their own words, Flickr is also free, and easy to use.
n
(updated regularly)
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Profile: Del.icio.us
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 16 |
early 2004 Seed funding in early April, 2005 (rumored $2 millionish) by Union Square Ventures, Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Kopelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young. Deli.cio.us is also one of the defining web 2.0 applications. It was created by . Delicious made tagging popular. It is an open-bookmarking service with tagging. You tag your bookmarks (any URI, meaning a web page or a single blog post), which helps you organize the data. The exceptionally cool thing about delicious is that you can view the data that others have tagged in many different ways. There are tools you can add to your browser, etc. to easily tag URIs as you view them. The second screen shot below shows this in action For instance. shows all the delicious tags I’ve ever created. Likewise, shows all of the tags created by Josh Schachter, the founder. You can also view the data by tags. shows all techcrunch tags added by users. Replace “techcrunch” in the URL with anything else and see the results. You can also view popular tags at . And so on. RSS feeds are available for any search/browse string, so monitoring new tags is a snap. Every day, people find new ways to use delicious. In their own words, I often refer to delicious to find pages that I’ve bookmarked. And my full list of tags always is visible on the right-hand side of the page.
Joshua Schachter (Founder)
(updated regularly)
(regarding new servers)
(regarding tagging by media type, such as MP3 files or MPEG movies)
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Profile: Trumba
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 16 |
: June 10, 2005 $4.75 million in July, 2004 – Funded by August Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Trumba is an online calendar. Think Outlook but where multiple people/groups can author and view the calendar. Share it with some people, or publish it to the web. Yes, it’s Outlook on steroids. Trumba brings together Visio co-founders Jeremy Jaech and Ted Johnson with Visio CTO Peter Mullen. The user interface is well thought out, easy sailing. Having Kleiner and August behind you helps you hire the best of the best, so I’m not surprised at its ease of use. The signup process was one page, with a standard email confirmation required. Adding a new calendar item was a snap, and the level of detail you choose to include is up to you. Overall, it is a pleasure to use. You can also create multiple calendars (think work, friends, family), and have different colors for each to keep track of them. The product is not free, however. A sixty day free trial is included. After that, the price is $39.95/year. In their own words, One thing to note about open source competition: Dan Gillmor – web based, no downloads
– Create unlimited calendars
– Publish group calendars as web pages
– Share a calendar privately
– Email upcoming events to a distribution list
– Synchronize with Microsoft Office Outlook
– Access your calendar from any Internet-connected computer
– works with nternet Explorer 5.5 or later, Mozilla 1.4 or later, Netscape® 7.1 or later, Firefox 1.0 or later, and Safari 1.2 or later
Jeremy Jaech, President and CEO
Ted Johnson, Vice President Products
Peter Mullen, Chief Software Architect
Dennis Tevlin, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
Clyde McQueen, Director of Software Engineering and Web Operations,
–
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Profile – eTamp
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 16 |
eTamp is a web-based RSS reader. As a publisher you can add your feed without authentication (you must input your RSS feed, it cannot pull it from the base URL). It was easy to add Techcrunch. As a user, you can add from pre-selected content via browsing or searching. It doesn’t appear to flag new content.
Relevant Links:
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Update: Google Video Cracked
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 29 |
June 27, 2005. , A Norwegian guy took one day to crack Google’s new video viewer so that it plays video from any server, which is what VLC originally did. This is what Google should have done in the first place anyway. Jon Lech Johansen, also known as DVD Jon, posted software on his “So Sue Me” Web site that he says modifies the viewer so that it plays videos hosted on any server. The company’s Google Video Viewer, in turn, was modified from the free VLC media player to restrict it to playing video hosted on Google’s own servers. Google officials did not immediately return e-mail and phone messages left early Wednesday at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.”
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Profile: iTunes 4.9
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 28 |
June 28, 2005
As was widely anticipated, iTunes 4.9 launched today (22 mb download) for both windows and mac platforms. It includes significant new and enhanced features, including, most notably, support for podcasts. Michael Gartenberg on iTunes 4.9: The software is excellent and includes – all podcasts are currently free
– downloaded podcasts show up in a single iTunes folder called “podcasts”
– easy search/find
– one click subscription to a new podcast
– option to have all future podcasts download automatically
– Tools for submitting publisher podcasts on iTunes
– stays separate in iPod, so not shuffled with music
– autodelete after listening (awesome!)
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Profile: Rojo
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 17 |
San Francisco, CA Closed Beta – October 2004, Open Beta – April 20, 2005 Rojo is a web-based RSS Reader (list of all ) that combines great “standard” RSS feader features with tagging and social networking. It is an interesting experiment that is getting a lot of buzz. The service is completely free for users. It includes adds in the user interface. In their own words, was easy (with standard email confirmation), and I was able to import all of my feeds from bloglines (although this process could easily be simplified – I would much rather just tell them “bloglines” and my username, which some other web-based RSS readers do. Export of feeds via OPML is also offered. Rojo’s magic – what makes it stand out from the crowd – is the ability to tag posts, feeds and contacts. You can use those tags to sort and find your content, but you can also use them to find other potentially useful content from others, including your contacts. Adding contacts and sharing tags and feeds is very simple. Taggin of posts and feeds also partially solves the ranking problem with blogs – it helps the cream rise to the top. There are some other excellent reviews of Rojo out there and we’ve linked to many at the bottom of this post. See, for example, Jeff Clavier’s analysis . – Free
– Web-Based
– (relatively) easy import of feeds
– export of feeds
– Feed Reading and Discovery
– Search
– Tagging
– Sharing
– expand/collapse feeds
– – (combining Rojo Tags with Delicious Tags)
Christopher J. Alden, Co-founder, CEO
Timothy J.O. Catlin, VP of Engineering
Kevin Burton, Co-founder, Lead engineer
Christopher J. Alden, CEO
Dave Whorton, General Partner, TPG Ventures
Thomas Gieselmann, General Partner, BV Capital
Ron Conway, Managing Partner, Angel Investors LP funds
Marc Andreessen
Karen Edwards
Mark Graham, Co-founder
Brewster Kahle
Susan Mernit
Artie Wu
(great profile)
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Profile: Podscope
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 17 |
Fairfield CT April 19, 2005 Podscope makes audio files searchable by text keywords. It works pretty well. Search results show lists of podcasts that include the keyword, with links to the podcast. Also, you can also listen to a short 10 second snippet of the portion of the cast that includes the term you’ve searched on. This requires Macromedia Flash. This is great for research and ego searches. For instance if you to search results for podcasts that include the term “Dave Winer”. Click on the + sign next to a result and you can listen to the snippet: In their own words, The company is either affiliated with or uses technology by . There are a few easy-to-add features that would make this very useful – persistent search and RSS feeds for searches. I’m betting they’ll be added soon.
(negative review)
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Profile: Del.icio.us Direc.tor
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 26 |
June 22, 2005 del.icio.us direc.tor is an Ajax client-side bookmarklet application that, in the words of , From the site: It is easy to install and is a wonderful interface for Delicious. Johnvey Hwang
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Profile: PodTech
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 21 |
May 23, 2005 ( ) PodTech is a wonderful set of podcast interviews that is updated very frequently and features top tech celebrities (recent podcasts include interviews with , , , , and others). What got our attention is the sheer quality (not to mention quality) of people John is interviewing, and how quickly his new venture took off. After just two weeks, PodTech saw over 66,000 visitors, over 21,000 audio plays and 9,000 MP3 downloads ( ). Not bad for a site with no marketing other than word of mouth. In their own words, It’s one of our top-10 podcasts and we understand from John that his list of upcoming shows will blow us away. Stay tuned…
John Furrier (Founder)
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Profile: Furl
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 19 |
Founded in the spring of 2003 by Mike Giles. Acquired by on September 23, 2004 “The origin of the name came from the very geeky description of what the system does – File URLs. If you can enter a URL and see it in your browser, we can save it for you. Once the name started being used and it was time to find a replacement, we just couldn’t come up with one we liked more. It’s short, simple and pretty easy to remember. And as an added bonus, the definition of “furl” is “to roll up and secure,” which is exactly what we do with all the interesting Web pages you find online.” Furl is a social bookmarking site often compared to (TechCrunch review of delicious ). However, there are some key differences and many people use both obsessively. At its core, once you’ve signed up with furl, if you find a site/post that you want to retain, you can “furl” it and it is saved for you. You can find the site/post later by searching for tags that you’ve associated with it (or other meta data), or by a text search. If you understand delicious but are unfamiliar with Furl, the best way to describe Furl is a delicious. There are much deeper meta data options when bookmarking a page, for instance. With delicious, currently, you can only tag a page and annotate it with notes. With Furl, you can tag it, categorize it with pre-populated items, rate it and add notes. Many Furl users like these options when tagging pages. Some users don’t need the extra data, and don’t like the time it takes to fill it out. To see this visually, here is a screen shot of a furl bookmark: Furl also does other things differently than delicious. The site you’ve bookmarked is saved at Furl (each member gets 5 gigs of storage), which means you can keep data even if the page changes. And, this allows for super-fast text searches on pages you’ve bookmarked, something delicious can’t offer. puts it this way: Viewing all of your furl links is much like delicious. You can either view them by signing into the site, or you (and everyone else) can view the links by going to the user-specific URL. For instance, all sites bookmarked with Furl by techcrunch can be viewed at f . These pages are available by RSS as well. Replace “techcrunch” with any other user name in the link above, and you can see their bookmarks, too. Furl also has a private option, however, and those links will not be viewable to anyone except you. There are also other nice Furl options, like adding friends who can be notified of your new postings, and the Furl search engine is fantastic, almost as an afterthought. Another feature – if you view a furl’d URL, you can see other URLs that user’s Furl’d as well – a great way to find related content (see last screen shot below) Overall, Furl is excellent and highly recommended. – easy bookmarking of sites
– retains cached copy of site
– tag and full text search
– easy sharing of bookmarks
– great tools ( )
– great search engine
– great recommendation engine based on your furls – see last screen shot below)
– passionate users (see relevant links below) :
(discussion of Furl “tagging”)
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Profile: Gataga (extended features)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 21 |
Previous Profile: Gataga has just notified TechCrunch of new functionality: – (through Flickr)
– The new functionality allows tag searches of flickr images. It works well, if a little slow (give them time, their server has been crushed with users). This is a great addition to the overall tagging meta-search, and hopefully will be integrated with normal searches in the near future. Our favorite test is to do a search on Selma Hayek, our actress. Here’s the results (remember, just flickr for now): RSS feeds for searches are avaible. I would like to see the URL change to a set URI for the search as well, an easy fix (allows for posting to the search, emailing, etc.). If you have a cell phone or mobile device that supports XHTML (WAP 2.0), you can get Gataga results on your mobile device (point your device to . Technorati and Flickr tags only at the moment, but these guys get new functionality up – expect more soon. Screen shots here:
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Profile: BadFruit
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 21 |
BadFruit has a product called BadApple that is a plug-in for iTunes. It expands ITunes functionality to view and add podcasts directly into iTunes. This is NOT the iTunes support for podcasts announced by Steve Jobs a few weeks ago that will be included in the next version (4.9) of iTunes (and will allow for creation and charging as well). BadFruit is independent from Apple. At this point, BadApple supports adding and listening to podcasts, but not creation and charging. It is a PC only product, no plug-in for Macs is yet available. There is very little information on the BadApple website. Some info from the SF Chronicle though – is the whois information for Badfruit.com In their own words, After downloading and installing BadApple, you will have a “Podcasts” link you can click on from iTunes. You can use this to browse through categories to find the Podcast you want. Each podcast has a description. Once you locate a podcast you are interested in, double clicking on the podcast will load it to your library. When you plug in your iPod the podcast will be loaded to that depending on your settings. BadApple is free software. There is no charge to download the software or use the software.” NOTE: on their own discussion forum indicate serious integration issues with iTunes. We’ll update this as things progress. Note – second and third shots below are from . We have not yet installed the software based on comments in the forum.
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Profile: FeedNation
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 30 |
FeedNation is a web-based RSS aggregator that just opened up for business. It has some cool features, like RSS2Email that are very interesting. It looks like it supports tagging as well. Full Profile later.
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Profile: Vertical Leap Conference
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 30 |
Tuesday, June 28 2005, 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM Vertical Leap was an exceptional one-day conference held in the heart of Silicon Valley earlier this week, hosted by and . In their own words, The event focused on search, obviously, and web 2.0 themes were prevalent throughout. The event was very well blogged and we’ve linked to many of the posts below. All of the segments were interesting and well organized. A key focus was on investments in this space, of course, and the technology and customer approaches needed to dominate in niche search areas. The most interesting segment from our perspective was on news/blog search. The panel was moderated by Om Malik (with Steve Gillmor stepping in at the beginning because Om was late). In our opinion the seating of the panelists was symbolic when thinking about their companies from a web 2.0 perspective. Left to right, you had Chris Tolles (Topix.net), Jim Pitkow (moreover), Scott Rafer (feedster), Tantek Celik (technorati), and Om Malik. From the discussion it was very clear who “got” web 2.0 and who didn’t. As you went from left to right, the panelists were more focused on web 2.0, peaking with Om (I overheard a comment after the panel from an audience member that said “they spent more time on Om’s blog than on all of the others’ sites combined”). :-) Om kept asking questions that the others just couldn’t answer about user interfaces, search relevance and tagging. Chris, at the web 1.0 end of the table, wasn’t keen on RSS and tagging, and stated repeatedly that Topix.net went for the “wow” factor in deciding where to place content. “People want to hear about murders and bankruptcies, not companies making their numbers”, said Chris when asked about search relevance. Scott and Tantik just shook their heads, as did most of the audience. Om looked away towards the audience and chuckled. That being said, topix.net is an awesome site and after sifting through their 250 RSS feeds I found a great one and subscribed. There is a fundamental shift going on in the Internet, and some people speak the new language. Others simply hear gibberish. Overall, a wonderful conference, terrific networking event, and plenty of coffee was available all day. Thanks Jeff and Dave for putting on a terrific conference. Program Chairs:
, Director of Marketing, Simply Hired
, Founder and Managing Partner, SoftTech Venture Consulting Agenda
8:30-9:00am Registration / Continental Breakfast 9:00-9:45am Keynote
Dave Hills, CEO, LookSmart 10:00-10:45am Investing in Vertical Search
Moderator: Jeff Clavier, SoftTech VC
Mark Kvamme, Sequoia Capital
Chris Moore, Redpoint Ventures
Theresia Ranzetta, Accel Partners
Andreas Stavropoulos, Draper Fisher Jurvetson 11:00-11:45am Local Search
Moderator: Charlene Li, Forrester Research
Brady Forrest, MSN
Paul Levine, Yahoo! Local
Shailesh Rao, Google
Daniel Read, Ask Jeeves 12:00-1:00pm Lunch Provided 1:00-1:45pm Shopping Search
Moderator: Gary Stein, Jupiter Research
Mark Bradley, NexTag
Graham Jones, PriceGrabber
Chris Saito, Yahoo Shopping
Michael Yang, Become.com 2:00-2:45pm Travel Search
Moderator: Niki Scevak, Jupiter Research
Phil Carpenter, SideStep
Vajid Jafri, Cfares
Scott Jampol, Yahoo Travel / FareChase
Beatrice Tarka, Mobissimo 3:00-3:45pm Classifieds / Job Search
Moderator: John Zappe, Classified Intelligence Report
Craig Donato, Oodle.com
Gautam Godhwani, Simply Hired
Konstantin Guericke, LinkedIn
Garrett Price, Kijiji 4:00-4:45pm News / Blog Search
Moderator: Om Malik, Business 2.0
Tantek Celik, Technorati
Jim Pitkow, Moreover Technologies
Scott Rafer, Feedster
Chris Tolles, Topix.net 5:00-5:45pm Future of Vertical Search
Moderator: Barney Pell, Mayfield
Ofer Ben-Shachar, RawSugar
Julia Komissarchik, Glenbrook Networks
Paul Pangaro, Snap.com
Bob Wyman, PubSub Concepts
(great quotes – “There are only so many telecom executives to convict…”)
(multiple posts)
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Profile: PodShow
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 24 |
Miami & New York 2004 (PodShow site launched March 2005)
PodShow.com is part of a family of companies/shows under , which was founded in 2004 by and Ron Bloom.
:
These companies each do different things: looks to be the main brand for the network of companies. It is currently mostly an information site, with additional features to be launched in the summer 2005. It has different sections for podcasters and for listeners: : This area of the site gives information on how to produce and promote a show, as well as getting it featured in the Sirius and/or PodShow network. I imagine future releases will have additional tools and features, but for now links include and . : This area of the site gives listeners basic information on podcasts and how to find and listen to shows. On the home page there is also a nice flash tool to listen to PodShow’s featured shows directly (no downloading from here though): is a site that gives good basic information on podcasting and also has a nice podcast directory and tool for downloading podcasts and getting them on portable music players. This is a functional site and I imagine it will become part of the overall PodShow architecture and brand. is Adam Curry’s daily audio blog. Here you can download and/or listen to Adam’s daily thoughts on…everything. For instance, today’s show can be heard . Check it out. It’s awesome and always a fun listen. It’s currently the most popular podcast show with Dave Winer’s a close second. : Adam also has a weekday radio show on . We have no idea, but we look forward to future releases! Yup, we definitely will. There are major differences between this group of companies and the other podcast directories and services (see, for instance, – our profiles ). The primary difference is that Podshow owns the most popular podcast in the world, and is run by a celebrity (and nice guy) – Adam Curry. So, do they have a chance against (or to work with) the upcoming iTunes 4.9? Yes, of course – and by the way, Adam Curry was featured in Apple CEO Steve Jobs keynote address at the WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) from San Francisco’s Moscone West on June 9. I wonder if we’ll hear anything new at Adam’s tomorrow afternoon? :-)
Adam Curry
Ron Bloom
(May 14, 2005)
(from )
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Profile: Twingine
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 24 |
Norway Twingine was created by . It was previously, infamously, known as “YaGoohoo!gle”, but after discussions with Yahoo and Google Trademark lawyers, Asgeir to “Twingine”. It’s a fun tool. A search yields a two pane results screen with Yahoo and Google results side-by-side. Asgeir Nilsen
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Profile: BuzzNet
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 23 |
March 2003 Buzznet, Inc.
2404 Wilshire Blvd. #11b
Los Angeles, CA 90057
(213) 252-8999 phone
(213) 252-8955 fax BuzzNet is a photo-sharing community. It’s hard to talk about BuzzNet without comparing and contrasting it to Flickr. It shares most or all of Flickr’s strengths, and has a few additional features as well. It’s these additional features that make it better, in my opinion, both for casual and/or “mobile” users as well as serious photographers looking for a way to share their work. I’ll explain why below. First, the basics. You can check out a quick tour that shows how it all works. Sign up for a free BuzzNet account and you can upload photos directly to their website, or email photos with a unique email address that contains a keyword you choose. This allows for easy mobile photoblogging – just snap a picture with your phone and have it up on your photoblog in seconds. Pictures can be tagged (they call it “buzzwords”) by you and anyone else (Flickr only allows tagging by you and your friends). Users can search/browse by these tags, and they are indexed at Technorati as well and thumbnails are shown for technorati searches for those tags. See, for instance, a and check out the BuzzNet and Flickr photos on the right. Every user has a unique URL for their pictures, comments and profile information. You can see the Techcrunch photoblog at . For infinitely cooler photoblogs, check out some of the featured ones on the . For example, a guy named Adam Richman, who recorded an album in his parents’ basement in Pennsylvania, is photoblogging while on tour. Uploading pictures is easy, and here’s the part that I like better than Flickr: Instead of limiting the amount of upload capacity (20 megs per month at Flickr), BuzzNet only limits the number of total photos you can upload per month (just increased from 60 to 120 on the free account). Why is this important? Here’s why – With Flickr I have to take time to resize photos so that I don’t immediately use up my monthly allotment with just ten 2 mb pictures. At BuzzNet, I just send in the big file and they resize for me. And a little known fact (told to me by Marc Brown, the co-founder and President), is that the original, full size image is stored for me by BuzzNet – a killer archive tool for serious photographers and it will allow them to offer high-quality printing services in the future (just click a button and they can create a bound album and send it to you). BuzzNet seems to have more “buzz” around photos than Flickr as well. Marc tells me that, of those photos with comments, there are an average of five comments, higher than Flickr. Since BuzzNet has deeper profiling of users than Flickr, it seems obvious that more social networking will occur. – easy posting
– unique URL for every user
– RSS feed for every user page
– commenting on pictures (with user settings)
– easy tagging
– generous free account features – 120 photos per month
– easy to invite friends to join
– get three friends to join and they’lll upgrade your account to a premium subscription for a full year
– Buddy list
– Trackbacks (who links to you)
– Bookmarks (your favorite photos on Buzznet)
– Favorite communities and Buzzwords/tags
– Private messaging – like web-based email
– Custom design templates
– Share Photos: e-mail photo to a friend
– Statistics: page views, and other stats Marc Brown – Co-founder, President
Anthony Batt – Co-founder
Steve Haldane – Director of Technology
Rich Lee – Art Director
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Profile – Talkr
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 15 |
New Hampshire April 18, 2005
Talkr is a site/service that converts text feeds directly into audio files. For instance, to listen to this post, click . As a blogger, signing up is relatively simply. Steps: 1. Make a request at the site
2. They quickly send a follow up email, with a link to a that you must physically sign and fax or send back to them. The agreement allows them to place ads into the audio, so that is another potential revenue source for them (and I’m fine with that since they aren’t charging me for the service)
3. Once you return the documents, they send another email with directions on setting it up at your blog. This consists of adding an html snippet (note the talkr gif under our xml gifs at the top of our sidebar. You also have a URL structure to allow any post to be listened to – See above for the audio of this post. The audio can be downloaded as an MP3 file as well. As a listener, there is fairly deep content to scroll through, and you can add any other blog you like (up to three for free). Given that they have only been live for a month, the content is actually quite good (heck, it includes Techcrunch :-) ). There is both search and browse capability, and there are links to a few on the home page to allow easy testing of the service. The recording is automated, but good quality. The main problem is that you lose hyperlinks and images. In their own words, For listeners, there is a free version, Talkr Basic for $5/month and Talkr Premium for $8/month I like this service and there may be some “there” there, as Keith always says. Chris Brooks, CEO
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Profile – Qumana
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 15 |
In fact, I’m using Qumana right now to write this post. :-)
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Profile – VSkype
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 15 |
Santa Cruz, California June 15, 2005
vSkype is a new product launch by (disclaimer: , a partner at Archimedes Ventures, was formerly the CEO of Santa Cruz Networks). vSkype is an add-on to Skype that lets you have up to on a . We tested the software out this morning and it works very, very well. Voice and video quality was more than acceptable. A bunch of video add-ons for Skype have emerged over the last few weeks, including and . We have not tested these services yes and so cannot compare them with vSkype. In their own words, has a great comment on vSkype: Given that both of these companies share as an investor, I would not be surprised if an acquisition is coming.
Barry Spencer – Founder, Chairman, & CTO
Timothy C. Draper – Director
Joe Costello – Director
Robert A. Troy – Director
(great post)
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Google Reviews Profile
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 12 |
There’s not much on the web about this yet, but Google is apparently looking at the reviews space and has put a very light experiment up on their site. I say “light” because the only product reviews they have up as of today are for Star Wars III. It looks like the first post on Google Reviews was by in a post dated May 9, 2005. spoke up today on the subject . Reviews are a very interesting space. People use their blogs often to review books, movies, music, restaurants, and just about everything else out there that we interact with. It’s an obvious area to aggregate and network. (see also ) (the CTO of ), has created a structured blogging plugin for WordPress for reviews (and also events) that is excellent and that I use at my . And there is also the initiative. Finally, there is a rudimentary blog review aggregator at . Anyway, it is what it is and the space is worth watching. A lot of Google’s moves seem to be placing it squarely in the middle of web 2.0. Relevant Links:
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BackPack Profile
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 12 |
BackPack launched in early May 2005, and it is one of the defining web 2.0 applications. BackPack does one thing very, very well – organize your personal information online. It has a basic package that is free, and it is one of the first applications built on and . If you aren’t familiar with these development platforms, all you need to know is that data transfers and page updates occur without submitting and refreshing, it is lightning fast and there are NO client downloads to deal with. BackPack is a perfect use of these emerging development technologies. To understand how this technology kicks web 1.0 in the pants, just compare it to Microsoft’s (which I used for about 10 minutes before never opening again). At its core BackPack is an information management tool. It is one of the showcase applications created by , along with (“Project Management Utopia”) and (“Make Lists and Get Stuff Done”). In their own words, There are a number of suggested uses, with screenshots . In our opinion, the key uses are to create pages of to do lists, planning for trips or events, taking and updating notes on products, etc. The great thing about it is how easy it is to create a new page, and add text and files, including images. You can share those pages with friends or the whole world. After you create pages, you can group them in any way you think is appropriate. There are no mandatory fields, complex multi-step processes, or specialized “buckets” for data. A basic account is free. Upgraded accounts have a monthly fee of $5, $9, or $19 (see the last screen shot below) (more $ = more storage and more reminders). You need at least the $5/month option to get some file storage space. – Home page to easily manage all sub-pages
– Easy to make new pages
– Easy to add content to a page – links, notes, files, images, etc.
– Set reminder feature, with reminders via email, sms or RSS
– Tagging of pages
– Sharing of pages (public or just friends)
– email pages
– email data to a page (like posting a picture to with a cameraphone)
(on a BackPack page!)
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Odeo Profile
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 13 |
: San Francisco Private Beta
Odeo will be a a podcast service that lets users search, find, and subscribe to podcasts, as well as a tool to create your own podcasts with minimal hardware. Odeo is built on . In their own words, There isn’t much to see yet because their product is only available via an invitation-only beta. However, there are a couple of people who’ve tested the product and have blogged on it. From : Unfortunately the Odeo Studio feature isn’t up yet. Odeo Studio is, and I quote, a browser-based tool that makes it easy to record and publish. With the Studio, and a cheap microphone (or even the one built into your laptop), you have everything you need. Thats interesting, and if they do things right, that may be the feature that gives them the edge I was talking about on my previous post about Odeo and iTunes. We’ll have to wait and see.
I like how the overview page (the entry page to Odeo) lists featured content, the Zeitgeist (what people are listening to right now) and Odeo news.” It looks like Odeo will also support tagging of content, which will be a crucial way to find good stuff – audio, unlike text, is hard to preview and so metadata is even more necessary.
Evan Williams ( ) ( )
Noah Glass ( ) ( )
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YubNub Profile
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 13 |
At first glance this looks sort of like a search engine or something, but its not. It is way neater than that. YubNub is a “command line for the web” and was built with . What this means is that you can access web applications (like google, amazon, and everything else) via the command box on YubNub’s website. A command consists of at least two pieces of information – an application identifier and a specific command. For instance, if you type in “flkall ireland”, YubNub will redirect you to the flickr website and show pictures with the tag “ireland”. There are a and functionality to new ones directly by users. You can also use YubHub as a .
flkall – shows flickr phots with all tags entered
GMT – find local time and date in entered location
mini – turn a long URL into a short one using minilink.org
pod – search for podcasts on Podcast Alley.
quote – get a stock quote, just enter the symbol
say – to “say” everything entered after “say”
An alias for “tts”
areacode – Lookup a city by area code. US only. Thx Verizon.
jobs – Performs a search at Indeed.com for available jobs that include the keywords provided.
For a current list of all commands, click
Jonathan Aquino
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SNOCAP Profile
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 14 |
September, 2002 Snocap allows those who own rights to music to place them onto p2p networks and retail sites with . This means that, through Snocap, music can theoretically be controlled (charged for and copies restricted) and still leverage the extremely popular p2p sites for distribution. It was founded by , the creator of the original Napster p2p filesharing network in 1999. The current business models for selling music include iTunes (pay per download) and subscription services like Yahoo, Napster and Rhapsody that allow you to listen to, and download, anything and everything in their catalog for a monthly subscription fee ranging from $5 – $20 per month currently. Snocap does things differently. They are decentralized and therefore do not require, or even provide, a centralized service for downloading music. Rather, they have focused on the platform and relationships with labels. Current label partners include: Universal Music Group, SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, EMI, Absolutely Kosher Records, Artemis Records/Sheridan Square Entertainment, Digital Musicworks International, IDEA Distributors, I AM Music and Entertainment, Gammon Records, Independent Online Distribution Alliance, Kufala, Streetbeat Records / Pandisc / Kriztal Entertainment, Nacional Records, Nettwerk Records, OM Records/Deep Concentration, One Little Indian, Psychobaby Reality Entertainment, Ryko Group, Six Degrees, SSDD and TVT Records. Snocap allows labels to charge for music (snocap will take a cut ranging from 0% – 2.5% of the fee charged by the labels). They also charge labels for premium accounts give increased functionality and reporting. – allowslabels and individual artists to embrace peer-to-peer networks as a safe and secure distribution channel.
– one-stop access to clear rights and manage online distribution across retail destinations.
– ability to maintain full control of content by determining business rules and setting pricing and usage terms.
– accounting and reporting services
– method for independent artists to distribute and sell their music – centralized access point for all their licensing needs.
– ability to sell music from the vast selection of music now only available on file-sharing networks.
– incremental revenues from live, remixed and out-of-print works
– reduced costs by eliminating the need to maintain relationships with thousands of copyright holders
Shawn Fanning – Chief Strategy Officer
Ali Aydar, Chief – Operating Officer
Christian Castle – General Counsel Ron Conway
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FeedBurner Profile
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 14 |
Chicago FeedBurner is a service that takes a normal, everyday RSS or Atom feed of any kind and turns (burns) it into a feed that you can then distribute to readers for use in any RSS reader. The company currently hosts more than 60,000 combined RSS and Atom feeds for over 40,000 content publishers. The company’s hosted service currently processes over 5 million daily views of RSS content including podcasts and video weblogs. One reason a blog or website owner would want to use this is because it simplifies the RSS feed. The Feed URL for Techcrunch, for instance, is “http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch”, which is a much simpler format that standard RSS feeds. Also, most blogging software offers a variety of RSS feeds – Atom, RSS 1.0, 2.0, etc. Sometimes these feeds don’t work properly with some readers. And if a site can get most of its readers to use the single Feedburner feed, they can take advantage of the great statistics and tools to see where readers are coming from and what they are clicking on. FeedBurner offers two services – a free version and a Pro version that costs between $5-$16 per month depending on the number of feeds managed. The stats for the free version are great, and the pro version also shows more detail and a “who’s syndicating me” feature. The Pro version has a 15 day free trial. The big reason for using FeedBurner, however, is that it can automatically add Google Adsense adds to your feeds, allowing you to easily generate revenue if you have a large enough audience. There are a number of influential bloggers who don’t like this service, however (and other aspects of FeedBurner as well) – see Relevant Links below for more information. One drawback to FeedBurner was the difficulty in turning it off and moving your feeds off the network (while retaining your audience). The method for doing this was complicated and clunky (or required you run your site from your own server) and so many top bloggers stayed away from their service. However, on June 10, 2005 FeedBurner (this is the FeedBurner blog) a new feature to allow easy transition away from FeedBurner whilst retaining your readers. Nice move. So FeedBurner offers ease of use, great stats, revenue AND a relatively painless way out. Thumbs up from TechCrunch . – very easy to use
– nice URL string for the feed
– generate revenue from RSS ads
– RSS page isn’t just xml code, it has a nice look/feel
– great stats for your feeds
– easy transition out of FeedBurner if you ever want to leave
Dick Costolo, CEO
Eric Lunt, CTO
Steve Olechowski, COO
Matt Shobe, Chief Design Officer
r
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Profile – PubSub
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 14 |
New York February 9, 2004 PubSub, which is short for “publish and subscribe”, is a future search engine. It’s also called “persistent search”. Users input keywords on subjects that they are interested in. The keywords are stored, or “persistent”. PubSub’s matching engine compares these stored/persistent queries against newly-discovered pages on an ongoing basis, in real time. What this means: If you would like to be notified of websites that post about subjects you are interested in, you input the search terms, and PubSub will notifiy you as posts appear that include your keywords. A great (necessary, really) feature is the ability to store any persistent search and view it via RSS in your favorite reader. At TechCrunch, for instance, we have stored search terms like “Web 2.0” and are notified in our RSS reader of all new posts or articles that include the term “Web 2.0”. People generally refer to what PubSub does as either persistent search or future search, whereas regular search engines like Google are refered to as retrospective search. Persistent search notifies you of future content as it is created. Retrospective search engines help you find content that is already out there on the web. If you find it hard to get your mind around this, try it out, and make sure you take the RSS feed from your subscription so that you don’t have to go back to the site to check and see if there are any new results. As the alerts start rolling in to your RSS reader, you will be very pleasantly surprised. PubSub is also very strongly behind a initiative which helps bloggers structure topic-specific posts like reviews (books, music, etc.) and events. A wordpress plugin is available at , that we use here at TechCrunch as well as on our personal blogs. We like pubsub and have many, many subscriptions to keep us up to date on topics that interest us. As an example, is the RSS feed for our subscription to “web2.0 and web 2.0” (where we seem to consistently find great posts from a blog called the , the Web 2.0 blog on the net :-). – Future or Persistent search at lightning-fast speeds (subject only to RSS time limitations)
– web based
– IE or Firefox client option – see screen shot #3
– Great user interfact
Bob Wyman, CTO and co-founder
Salim Ismail, CEO and co-founder
Richard Treadway, CMO
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Gataga Profile
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 13 |
<img src='https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2005/07/gatagalogo.gif' alt='' / What is it? Gataga is a social bookmarking search engine. As of today, it indexes bookmarks from , , , , , , and . They added furl, simpy, spurl and connotea literally overnight at the request of . Alexandra also suggested RSS feeds for search results, and they have added those today as well. There is a “Sherpa” option that acts like the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button at Google. It needs some work to become useful – although typing in “techcrunch” and hitting the Sherpa button brough us right to where we wanted to go. Searches can be made by keywords or tags (both shown below). The fact that they are including most tagging data sources as well as the search result RSS feeds make this a compelling and useful site if you are interested in searching through socially-tagged URIs. We will use it regularly.
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Profile: Odeo (Update)
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 22 |
June 13, 2005 Lots of Odeo beta invites went out today, and TechCrunch received one. We signed up. We did things. Everything worked, except the “create podcast”, which they told us up front wouldn’t work. In their own words, – 6.3 meg syncr download (allows easy syncing with mp3 players, auto adding, etc.)
– very hokey welcome message from Biz Stone
– nice tools for finding/searching for podcast “channels” and adding them to your subscription
– “create podcast” features remain unlaunched.
– syncer works great My wish list – auto delete option after listening to a show (from the mp3 player) See previous profile
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Profile: Sxip
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 22 |
October 2003 Vancouver, BC, Canada The Sxip Network (“sxip” is pronounced “skip”) is an identity management registry for both users and websites/services/ASPs. They have presented at conference and have generated lots of discussion. This is a single-sign-on solution. Think Passport, but decentralized and you don’t have to trust Microsoft to store and distribute your data. Think of this as the Verisign (domain names) of identity. As a user, if you see a sxip button on a website, you can click it and give permission for sxip to transmit some of your personal data to the website instead of re-filling out those endless forms. You can create different identities with Sxip – say personal and work – and decide who gets what information. If you aren’t yet part of Sxip, you will be presented with the option of joining when you click the Sxip button. What this means – if websites adopt this you will not need to fill out registration forms or have different credentials (usernames and passwords) for each of these sites. Sxip is going about this the right way. The platform is based “on a network architecture similar to DNS”, and includes the following participants: Registered Sxip Network users who communicate with the Network via their browser. Websites that store user data and release it (with the user’s consent) to other websites via a browser. Websites that request user data from Homesites via a browser. The central identity registry that manages Homesite and Membersite membership in the Sxip Network and issues and stores the data that identifies users as members of the Sxip Network (for example, a user’s Globally Unique Persona Identifiers (GUPIs) are stored at the Sxip Rootsite). . . This is a decentralized, secure solution that can scale. If websites adopt it, the network effect will kick in massively and this will better the internet. In their own words, This can help the internet in non-obvious ways, like killing comment and trackback spam. Sxip demoed at Supernova an Alpha release of Sxore, their free new comment server that stops comment spam on blogs (Sxore uses Sxip Network technology). It should be
available soon and information is available at . You can try this out (as a user) on a demo site . Dick Hardt – Founder & CEO
John Diack – COO
Chuck Mortimore – Vice President, Product Architecture
Lori Pike – Director of Corporate Communications
Tim Baur – Director of Security and Systems
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Profile: ufeed
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 22 |
June 2005 ufeed aggregates posts from your blog, posts to delicious and pictures posted to flickr into a single web page that they host, with an RSS feed. The service is associated with . It’s pretty raw right now, but functional, and new features are promised. You can use their service without registering, although registration allows a number of additional benefits: The service is easy to set up and both the registered and unregistered versions are free. I’ve created a techcrunch account and have aggregated the posts/feeds – you can see it at . This is coolish, but needs some UI work and added features to become really useful.
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Profile: Bloglines
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 6 | 22 |
Oakland, CA July 1, 2003 ( ) Acquired by Ask Jeeves on February 8, 2005 ( ) Bloglines is a free, web based RSS reader. It’s the most popular, with NewsGator/Feeddemon a close second by number of users. If you are new to RSS, Bloglines is a very good place to start (for a complete list of web-based RSS readers, see ). Bloglines has a “two pane” format, with folders and feeds listed on the left (bolded if there are new unread entries), and content from the selected feed shown at the right. If you read content from a lot of sites, this is an excellent way to organize information. It’s also very similar to the interface for most email applications, so its familiar to most people right from the start: at Bloglines is very easy. All they ask for is an email address and password: Once you are a member, you have a variety of great tools. – add feeds of your favorite websites (cut and paste, or add a button to your browser toolbar to auto-add any site you are on that has a feed)
– easy import and export of feeds via opml file
– create folders to organize content
– see the number of total subscribers for any feed, and see usernames of public subscribers
– add in feeds from any other subscriber (if you like their content) There is also a very neat feature that isn’t discussed very often. You can create a bloglines email address. Any email sent to this address appears within your feeds. This is a great way to move newsletters and other interesting content from your inbox to bloglines. Clearly bloglines is adding tools and features to make it useful as a portal/inbox. They’re adding things like “weather” to further this goal. Overall, we like bloglines over other current web-based RSS readers, although we’d love to see a tagging tool like Rojo (Rojo profile ). You can see public feeds for any user at bloglines.com/public/[username]. For instance, my public feeds are viewable at . Mark Fletcher
(March 31, 2005)
(2004)
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Glide Effortless is Too Much Effort
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 5 |
is a service that will help you upload and share just about any type of file – photos, MP3 files, video clips and even Word, PowerPoint or PDF documents. A article by David Pogue talks about the service in mostly glowing prose: THIS system means that you never actually send any files, so you don’t clog anyone’s in-box. More important, you now have total control over the material. From the moment you upload a file to Glide, it’s converted into an online preview. Your visitors can listen to one of your songs or watch one of your videos, but they can’t download it, keep it, or even replay it without returning to the Web site. As a result, you can limit how many times somebody plays or watches something, or specify a window of opportunity (say, Dec. 5 to 20) for people’s access. You can even play Big Brother by tracking how many times each person has viewed or played a certain goody. With just a few clicks, you can also publish one of your containers as either a Web page, complete with embedded pictures and videos, or a blog entry. It’s almost automatic, although you have no control whatsoever over the layout of the result. All of this is fun to use, thanks to a full-blown online operating system that Glide designed itself. After all, thought TransMedia, why make the site look like Windows or Mac OS X, when a custom design could be simpler and better tailored to Glide’s functions? In the Glide OS, each object on the screen – thumbnails, containers and so on – bears a tiny “badge” that resembles a pie chart. When you point to it, a round menu sprouts at your cursor tip. It lists commands pertaining to that object (Delete, Edit or Publish, for example), arrayed like colorful slices of a pizza. I spent some considerable time this evening trying to get my arms around this rather large project, but gave up before I was even able to finish registration. The home page is a complete mess. This is the first impression a company gives to new potential customers, and Glide decided to pack everything in with . It’s a damn magnum opus that describes everything Glide was, is and will become, without ever really getting to the point. Registration is a train wreck. There is a free account option, but every registration requires a full name and home address. I entered that, but gave up when it required a credit card to be put on file, even though I was just trying to test the free account. I understand that Glide wants “real” customers since even the free account comes with 150 mb of storage, but this was just too much to ask of a new customer. I sighed, left the computer and drank a glass of wine. I decided to try again. I re-started registration, but the “techcrunch” username was now “taken” due to my previous attempt. And there is no way to resume my previous registration. Requesting a password reset failed. The name was reserved but wasn’t an active account. I could try again with a different user name, but honestly, since 99% of users will also have given up after seeing the home page design and refusing to give up all of this personal information, what’s the point? Glide “Effortless” is just too much effort. If anyone has gone to the effort of getting it up and running, please let me know if it was worth it.
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Boltfolio Launches – Share Any Media
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 5 |
I received scored of emails on “ ” post last month from passionate users of various products as well as a number of stealth companies preparing for launch. One of the most interesting companies to launch in this space is New York based . Until recently, Boltfolio was unknown to me. What I like best about Boltfolio is that they have unlimited storage and allow uploading of virtually any media file – photos, video and audio. Users should not have to go to multiple sites to upload different kinds of content. They incorporate tagging to assist with search, and also have blogging and other tools to allow users to share content. They also allow for private and public settings on each piece of content. This is another worthy addition to the exploding ranks of media storage and playback. I’ve said this before, but one of the key tools to getting power users is having a client-based .
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Protopage v 2.0
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 5 |
version 2.0 of its Ajax desktop today. I previously in August. There are a number of new and interesting features, which are described in the Protopage . It continues to be extremely fast and easy to use. Protopage was an earlyish entrant into the Ajax desktop market, which is now crowded with products like , , and . is also a choice, of course, although they have chosen Flash over Ajax for their platform. Microsoft Live is the only extensible product, with a growing number of available for use. And there is yet another Ajax desktop product entering the market in the next few weeks that also has an open API for third party developers to add functionality. As I mentioned above, this is an extremely crowded market – with uncertain economics.
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Inform.com Re-Launches with Major Feature Changes
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 5 |
, a recently launched news aggregator, is re-launching on Monday with a number of feature additions and enhancements. I am calling this a “re-launch” because the changes are significant and affect the core platform of the site. The most significant change is that Inform is no longer operating within a “pop-up”, a process that allowed them to use Ajax functionality but avoid some of the drawbacks like lack of a “back button” feature. Inform now operates cleanly, without popups, in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. This change alone makes Inform a much more interesting and useful service. Other significant changes include the addition of audio and video content to the site, a subject filter that offers related content and which works quite well, and the addition of RSS feeds for search results. Finally, the “top channels” tab now allows drill down into sub-topics, which were not available before. Overall, Inform is an excellent resource and continues to improve dramatically. They have not yet added a feature to allow users to add non-included news source RSS feeds, but that is on the roadmap and will be released soon. My previous profiles of Inform are and .
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iPod Video Dating, with Tags
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 3 |
, which on November 16, is a video dating site with tagging that focuses on allowing members to download videos of people they are interested in to their iPod. The service is free and allows searching by tag, gender and zip code. It seems like adding an RSS feed for a search is an obvious feature to add, but it’s not there yet. PodDater follows as an early dating site adopter of tagging.
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Transcribing Podcasts
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 2 |
at the Business 2.0 blog found a company that is tackling one of the opportunities I mentioned in an – providing transcriptions of recordings to podcasters so that they can post searchable text along with the audio file. is not live yet, although they have a landing page up with some limited search capabilities and an email address for inquiries. Eric spoke with the company and gathered addtional information – apparently they are leveraging Amazon’s to produce human-created transcriptions (with software cleanup) of podcasts. We’re a super early stage startup – the idea is to sell search ads against the keywords in the transcriptions, which we generate using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk ( http://mturk.com) and some whizzy software. But we need capital to pay all those MTurk workers, so in the next few weeks we’ll be opening a store. It will allow Podcasters to purchase transcriptions of their shows. We’ll do the transcriptions and give them a full transcription – not just chunks pulled back by the search engine if it happens to index their show. Of course they automatically get listed in the engine, so this arrangement should drive traffic to them, get them transcripts, and get us the cash needed to keep on transcribing… This is a space I’ve been watching, as companies race to provide either human-created or automated solutions. I was excited by a article on November 30 that discussed two companies, and , that are attempting to automatically scan and transcribe podcasts. But after a review of their services I came away disapointed and decided to wait before reviewing them. Neither are ready for prime time yet.
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Attensa Announces Financing
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 5 |
will today (Monday). The round is being financed by , the venture capital fund announced in June 2005 by Jim Moore, John Palfrey and Richard Fishman. Attensa has previously raised capital from Craig Barnes (co-founder and CEO) SmartForest Ventures of Portland, Oregon, 2nd Avenue Partners of Seattle and angel investors. This is RSS Investors’ first investment. Attensa, which first launched in June, has a popular Outlook-based RSS reader and has additional products in development.Previous profiles and .
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Oboe's Web Music Locker
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 2 |
I begged for this in a about companies I’d like to profile that don’t exist yet (no. 1 – “better and cheaper online storage”). nailed it with a product suite called Oboe. Oboe offers unlimited online storage of music for $40/year. A free version of the product is also available, although it has extremely limited functionality (no online storage, for example). I’ve registered and have paid for the premium product. Music syncing is accomplished via a downloaded application (windown, mac and linux), and it is going to take forever. I have somewhere around 10,000 songs – and they upload at a rate of 200 songs per hour. That means I’ll be uploading for about 50 hours. Once the songs are uploaded, I’ll write more about how Oboe works. The site promises that users will be able to create and edit playlists, stream music at 128k, and even stream directly through itunes. Supported formats include MP3, MP4, M4A, M4P, AAC, WMA, OGG, AIF, AIFF and MIDI. One feature that is not clearly addressed in the is whether or not users will be able to download music back to their hard drive (in the event they’ve lost the data locally, for example). The FAQs do state, however, .There are obvious pirating issues with allowing this, as anyone with borrowed or stolen account credentials could download the music. MP3Tunes is a Michael Robertson company, who was the founder of MP3.com. Oboe is his latest attempt at allowing users to access their music online. Previously, MP3.com offered a service called Beam-It which allowed users to verify that they owned a cd by inserting it into their computer, and were subsequently able to access that music directly from the web. MP3Tunes is hoping to avoid the fate of Beam-It by acting as a service provider only and assuming that users legally own the music they upload. The provides limitations on service provider liability “with respect to information residing, at direction of a user, on a system or network that the service provider controls or operates”. I hope they win this one. Via . I left the syncer on all night. Everything crashed, nothing has uploaded yet. Uh oh. I am completely unable to actually upload any files whatsoever. Giving up. : I received an email from Michael Robertson…Oboe is trying to determine the error. I want this service so much, I am going to continue to try.
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Web 2.0 DNA
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 2 |
Brandon Schauer’s and historical timeline is an excellent resource to put web 2.0 companies into perspective and to understand their place in the overall ecosystem. I’ll be referring to it often in TechCrunch posts. More on .
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ajchat – AJax Instant Messaging on the Fly
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 20 |
I’ve been testing out tonight with (a fellow web 2.0 workgroup member). Like , and e-messenger.net, ajchat is an ajax instant messaging on the fly, that allows you to log in or type anonymously. It’s free. The ajchat blog is . At this point, it appears that all chat sessions are public and linked from the home page. There is also an option to share a chat directly on a webpage, and against my better judgement that is exactly what I am going to do here. If it works, it will appear below. This to me, is a compelling feature that starts to encroach on some of the stuff that is doing. I took down the chat box. The entire site went down shortly after I put it up. It was nice while it lasted, though. Ok, the ajchat site is back up, but very unstable. Trying this again because, frankly, it rocks. It broke again. Took it down. It looks like their hosting service killed them. For those of you who didn’t see it, really, it was very cool.
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Web 2.0 WorkGroup Expands to 25 Members
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 20 |
The Web continues its expansion with the addition of three awesome new bloggers – , and . joined last week. It’s becoming an increasingly fun place to hang out, even if lost their minds earlier this week (temporarily I hope). What I’m really looking forward to is seeing if Ben Barren writes emails the same way he writes his blog posts (our email list is quite active). :-)
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Automattic, Home of WordPress, Launches
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Michael Arrington
| 2,005 | 12 | 20 |
Matt Mullenweg and Ryan Boren have launched the Automattic site, which organizes their various WordPress and other projects. at Silicon Beat has the details. Also, and as predicted by , WordPress.org also that they will be integrated into Yahoo hosting in a similar deal as that last week. has more.
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