Category Archive: Web 2.0
Subcategories: No categories
Take the web 2.0 quiz
Are you a blossoming Mike Arrington clone, or a sheltered luddite?
I just fell short of Mike, but I think that is a good thing?!
Try it out and see for yourself ..
Technorati Tags: Web2.0
"Google Notebook" – ness
There seems to be a fair amount of buzz surrounding the imminent release of Google Notebook, yet another arrow in Google’s ever increasing quiver of products. No one is really 100% sure of what the full capabilities will be when it launches next week, but you can get a pretty good idea by browsing the screenshots posted by Erica Joy on her Flickr account.
Notebook seems to be somewhere between a competitor for the well known del.icio.us service and knowledge page type services like JetPack and Squidoo (without the cash). It has a rich AJAX API, allowing you to handily “add a note” or bookmark to your notebook page of choice (you can have many in different categories) straight from your Google search results and it has a handy back-end for organising all of your goodies and dealing with tasks like maintaining pages and categories, ordering notes (using a nifty AJAX drag-and-drop) etc.
You have the option of keeping a notebook private or sharing it in which case it is searchable by users of the engine.
Significantly this is yet another movement by Google into the world of Web 2.0 (let’s stick with this metaphor for now, shall we?), and it clearly underlines there interest in user supported services beyond Blogger.
Can we see a free version of FlickR soon?
On a more sinister note, do you see the picture evolving now as Google starts to bring users of other popular services into their own silo? There are elements of worry here, vendor lock-in being the main one, do we trust “Do no evil?”. I always find comfort in the fact that while Google is huge, you will always have alternatives and that while their services are great they are often not the best-of-breed (remember Blogger?), and that there will always be viable competitors in the space. For now..
Technorati Tags: Google Notebook, Web, 2.0
goowy, a flashy webtop
I have been looking at goowy a little and I must say that I reckon that it can come in pretty handy if you have the bandwidth to spare.
So, what is goowy exactly? Primarily it is one of the new generation of so-called webtops and it tries to encapsulate everything you need to have a virtual desk away from your real desk. The main difference with goowy is that it as all flash driven and gives it a somewhat different feel to the various AJAX-based solutions on the market already today.
Here are some of its handy integrated features:
1) A full featured email client. This mail client is really impressive and contains 90% of the capability of a desktop mail client. You can configure external pop accounts (only one at the moment) on top of the username@goowy.com account you recieve.
2) Nicely featured Instant Messaging client int the Meebo style, i.e. you can configure MSN Messenger, Yahoo and ICQ and AOL IM accounts if you have ones.
3) Contact Management. Pretty good, a handy feature is the import facility that will allow you to import up to 1000 contacts from various sources including: Yahoo! Mail, Gmail or from csv.
4) File storage supported by Box.com. This has a very nice interface that allows you to create folders, upload and manage files, tag them, and it even involves handy little features such as an image preview mode.
5) Calendaring. I has a good calendar that allows you to set up a detailed schedule. A little disappointing that there are no export options AFAIK.
6) Minis, these are similar to the widgets as per protopage.com and include RSS feeds, weather, quotes, stocks, to-do lists etc. A nice bonus is the inclusion of a media player to handle the streaming of enclosures in podcasts and videoblogs.
7) Games when you are a little bored.
All in all I like what goowy offers it seems to be something that can come in quite handy when you don’t have the convenience of your own computer at hand and the 1 Gig of free storage is definitely handy. I like the way flash has been used to make it feel slick and efficient, the design has some similarities to current Mac software as easily witnessed by the bouncing icons on the toolbars, and the alert sounds they play when a new email arrives is nice and not intrusive, although there is no easy-to-use mute button from what I could see.
I am not sure what the goowy business model will be, as there aren’t any moneymaking activities evident at the moment, but I can easily imagine a premium rated service that will include things like additional web storage capacity and the ability to tie in more POP accounts etc.
Give Goowy a spin, I recommend it!
New Flash based social networking site may pack a "Wallop"
Just as I thought Flash will be taking a backseat in the Web Two Oh space, I see this mention on TechCrunch of a new social networking endeavour (actually a spin off of an older project), to be launched soon called Wallop.
Not much is being disclosed about Wallop yet, except that it is significantly different than the existing Wallop project. I’ve seen a bit of what they plan to offer, and I’ll say that this is not another “me too” social network offering. For one thing, this is an all Flash application. And there are a number of unique business model twists that they aren’t announcing yet. The launch is scheduled for this summer.
Somewhat more amazing is the fact that the project seems to be backed by Microsoft (at least they did the old mywallop.com), and it is run by ex Microsoft man Karl Jacob (used to be an exec over there), is Microsoft showing some guts here?
Anyhow, this will good news for all you Flash addicts out there, keep an eye on it.
Technorati Tags: Flash, Social-Networking, Microsoft
MyToday.com
MyToday.com is a smart “”public” aggregator (vs. “private” aggragator which is your own feed list, these ones are pre-prepared by experts for ease-of-use) hailing from india, it has various location or topic based areas called “daily’s” and using the friendly interface one can “browse” the very up-to-date content right on the site, or export the dailies as OPML. One thing I love about the site is that it gives you a very nice “at-a-glance” overview of the newest news and post in the categories or “panels” that you can switch on and off at will.
Another very handy feature that I use quite often is the mobile portal available via http://m.mytoday.com, nice for a quick news update.
The guys there have approached me to put together an OPML list for them and I have obliged, its viewable at http://www.mytoday.com/southafrica/, have a look, and send in feedback and suggestions.
A Group Of Web AddiCT(s);
Mean to mention this a while ago, but congrats to Rafiq and the rest over at A Group Of Web AddiCT(s);, for there mention in ITWeb for their achievement in winning some cold hard cash money in the National Innovation Fund competition (for tertiary institutions).
They are a top bunch of guys that ask all the right questions.
All the best for the future Rafiq!
Optimise your paper trail with scanR
I saw a link to a service called scanR (another case of lost letters) in the geeknewscentral newsletter today.
I decided to give it a bit of a spin and was pretty surprised by what I found.
What it does:
In a nutshell it allows you to send in photos taken of a whiteboard document or fax and will then clean it up for you a little and send back a PDF document pre tagged with words found in the scan for easy searching in tools like Google Desktop.
How do you use it?:
Simple, take a picture with your > 1 megapixel camera phone (or by whatever other means) and bang an email through to the service. The first step for a new user involves a confirmation email and there after its smooth sailing.
What could it be handy for?:
This looks like it could be handy to take a quick snap of a whiteboard after meetings to save the time in writing down, I have done this a couple times and if this will make the resulting snaps easier to use it seems like a bonus. It should also be nice for people on the road to send through digitized copies of documents if they don’t have access to scanners. There may also be nice applications for keeping digital copies of a business paper trail due to the searching element.
Overall I think this is quite a smart idea, I don’t think that this will ever replace proper OCR and archival tools in business but it a nice bootstrapper solution for private individuals and corporates on a tight budget.
I included a before and after sample of a crappy cellphone image test.
Before:
After:
Poor results before, poor results after but you get the drift. As with everything else its a case of garbage in, garbage out and I think this is due to the poor lighting and crappy low resolution image taken by my phone, maybe 1.2MP is still too low?
ShoZu, takes the effort out of camera phoning.
Its true that there are ways of getting camera phone photos uploaded to your favorite service, mainly revolving around email, or alternatively downloading to your PC and then uploading , but it has always seemed a little like voodoo to non technical people. (Most people find even MMS difficult)
Along comes ShoZu an application enabling direct-from-phone uploading to four popular photo sharing/blog services:
1) Flickr
2) Buzznet
3) TextAmerica
4) WebShots
I was happy to see a large list of supported phones including mine, the Sony Ericsson V600i (K600).
During registration on the site you provide your phone number for the service to SMS you a download link. The SMS arrived instantly and the 216KB Java application proved easy to download and install.
After installation you are presented with a neat Java application that allows you to view all the photos on your phone, add tags, descriptions and titles and then upload these images to your photo service of choice, I chose flickr. A handy feature is that you can modify the meta data on the image even after the upload. Videos uploaded via the will be forwarded to an email address you can specify.
Its all very simple and easy to use, and its definately worth a look if you use your phone a lot.
Well done to the folks over at ShoZu!
Flooding the Blogosphere
Seth Godin thinks that we are posting to much noise on the blogosphere. (via A VC)
Kent Newsome also weighs in and says:
Asking the citizenry of the blogosphere (far too many of whom are chasing the almighty dollar) to be reasoned in their use of the shared blogosphere is like asking people not to litter.
What Kent is saying is of course true, there is just no way we are going to turn around from the current curve, people will post more and more, and the topics will become more and more diverse. What we have here is the age old problem of eyeballs, yes, that is a marketing 1.0 term and it is still relevant. How do we expose the value of the increasingly long tail. Seth says that a focused and author filtered blog will end up with fewer, but more loyal and consequently valuable readers, but does that mean that it should end there?
The other side of the coin is the argument for memetrackers and tagging as well as custom filters helping us out, but to tell you the truth I find the signal to noise ratio on these things to be equally low, although they are not far off.
What do I think the solution is? Simple. Collaborative filtering. Many years ago there used to exist a movie rating site (I think it was called movielobby.com back then), they had a movie rating system where you could feed it with movies that you liked, then based on what other people have rated it would do some simple maths and suggest you a couple movies to watch. Simple, and it worked. What was more is that the more you used it, the more accurate it got.
This is what we need, I have been working on some sort of solution for this the last couple of weeks, when I have time. I have a technology base figured out, that’s the easy part, but how do I make this work in the real-world. I have been thinking of a browser plugin, it needs to be really simple to rate blog posts on a scale of “This grabbed my attention” to “This left me cold”, the system will then take your ratings and match your profile to these of thousands of like-minded people and suggest posts for you, via RSS (number and frequency configurable). Kind of like a personal memetracker.
What do you think, sound like it could work?
Nativetext, crossing the language barrier.
Now this is an idea I can really get in to. Nativetext is a new service soon to be opening that will attempt to cross the language barrier in the world of syndicated content.
It is true that the bulk of syndicated content (RSS feeds and podcasts) are mainly available in English and while English is widely accepted it is also true that a large number of people aren’t fluid in it, or prefer to consume content in their native languages.
Nativetext plan on using humans to translate content from feeds submitted to the service in the requested language, no fancy high tech techniques here, just plain old hard work, the advantages should be content that maintain a sensible language structure (have you ever tried to make sense of an automated translation?) and should translate the localized nuances of the native languages a lot better.
I am not sure how they plan on scaling the vast number of requests, especially considering the number of feeds they would inevitably need to translate and the fact that RSS feeds will be translated for free, but I have read elsewhere that they may offer a paid for document translation service for business based on a bidding system for the signed up translator. Sounds a lot like amazon’s mechanical turk?
This seems like an exciting opportunity to provide the richness of content so prevalent in the western countries to the vast numbers of internet and cellphone users coming online now in the non-english speaking countries worldwide.
As a non-english speaking African I can attest to the fact that language is still a problem to some, so it follows that this should get some fantastic traction.
Technorati Tags: Web2.0, Nativetext, RSS