I’ve been testing out ajchat tonight with Brian Benzinger (a fellow web 2.0 workgroup member). Like Meebo, Gtalk 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 here. 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 Userplane is doing. UPDATE: I took down the chat box. The entire site went down shortly after I put it up. It was nice while it lasted, though. UPDATE: Ok, the ajchat site is back up, but very unstable. Trying this again because, frankly, it rocks. UPDATE: 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. → Read More
The Web 2.0 WorkGroup continues its expansion with the addition of three awesome new bloggers – Ben Barren, Stowe Boyd and Steve Rubel. Robert Scoble joined last week. It’s becoming an increasingly fun place to hang out, even if two of our members 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). → Read More
Toronto-based online photo sharing BubbleShare is just wonderful, and ridiculously easy to use. Their interface team deserves a gold star or something, because I don’t think I’ve ever used a site’s full functionality without consulting a single FAQ or other instruction. BubbleShare allows users to upload photos without registration (this isn’t really a trick either – later registration is absolutely bare bones). There is a tour linked from the home page, but you really don’t need it – just start uploading photos and you’ll get how it works (they use the Flash 8 upload feature for photo sharing). Things are album based. The free service allows users to create albums of up to 100 photos each, with a permanent URL for sharing. Photos can be dragged and dropped to change the order, resized and a voice comment can be added. Comments are available for visitors as well as an RSS feed. Another key BubbleShare feature that many photo sites don’t have is a multi-uploader tool that allows user to upload many photos at once. The only thing that BubbleShare is missing is photo tagging and tag search. BubbleShare is now my second-favorite Canadian web 2.0 company. Brian Benzinger has more. → Read More
Matt Mullenweg and Ryan Boren have launched the Automattic site, which organizes their various WordPress and other projects. Matt Marshall at Silicon Beat has the details. Also, and as predicted by Dave Winer, WordPress.org also announced that they will be integrated into Yahoo hosting in a similar deal as that announced with Six Apart’s Movable Type last week. Jeremy Zawodny has more. → Read More
I have to admit, I was hoping for the best but feared the worst as Bloglines moved over to a new data center last night. Their regular outages have enraged me in the past, although their stellar customer service almost completely made up for it (emails are returned instantaneously). Everything seems to be working very well. Bloglines is speedy and responsive. Let’s hope it stays that way as the blogosphere continues to explode. The last three posts to the Bloglines blog really tell the story of the stress they’ve been going through over the last few months. Reprinted below (read from the bottom up): Bloglines Has a New Home Bloglines has completed the relocation to our new data center. Don’t panic if some subscriptions haven’t started updating with new items yet. Our machines will be catching up with the activity of the blogosphere for the next few hours. We know a lot of you are getting the shakes so we didn’t want to keep you from your Bloglines any longer than necessary. There is also a known issue with some subscriptions showing incorrect unread counts. However, your unread items have not been lost. Clicking on the subscription will display all the unread articles. We are working to fix this. We’ll follow up with a more detailed post when we’re more settled in. Thanks again for your patience and support during this outage. – The Bloglines Team Mon, 19 Dec 2005 20:30:00 PST Moving Data Centers Bloglines will have a planned outage on Monday, December 19, 2005 in order to relocate to a new data center. Here’s our planned schedule for tomorrow: * 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC): Your subscriptions will stop updating with new items. * 4:00pm PDT (12:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be completely offline. During this time you will not be able to access your account. * 8:00pm PDT (4:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be back online by this time. New articles posted during the outage will appear in your account. We look forward to vastly improved hardware capacity and tons of elbow room for growth. Thank you for your patience during this outage. – The Bloglines Team Sun, 18 Dec 2005 15:50:00 PST We Feel Your Pain We’re not going to beat around the bush about this. Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately. Why? In short, Bloglines has been busting → Read More
I read about Orb’s V4S product on Scobelizer and Skype Journal. V4S is a good, free tool for sending voicemails to Skype and Outlook contacts. V4S joins a whole bunch of products attacking the same or similar market (sending voicemails over the web): YackPack, Odeo Waxmail, vemail, Springdoo and even the humble slawesome. → Read More
I’ve been hearing a bit about Microsoft’s Wallop project from users (apparently its at least two years old). Microsoft describes Wallop as a place to ” share photos, blog, and interact with your friends”. Ok, that pretty much doesn’t narrow it down much at all. The beta is closed and as I said above there isn’t a whole lot of descriptive information on the website. The Microsoft Social Computing website has a little more, and includes a couple of screen shots: In Wallop, you can share photos, blog, and interact with your friends. Wallop is a research project that explores how people share media and build conversations in the context of social networks. We are currently conducting a small, real world trial of Wallop with small friendship groups. Therefore, membership in Wallop http://mywallop.com is limited to study participants until the trial is over. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one. The other projects on the Social Computing website also look interesting. → Read More
Check this out: add “IndeedJobs” as a friend on Google Talk and say “hello”. You’ll get a nice (and fast) interface to the Indeed job search engine. Nice tool. → Read More
KritX is very raw, but they are on to something big – aggregation of reviews from blogs (the edge of the network). I wrote in a recent post (no. 9) that I’d like to see someting like this be built. Don’t look so much at the current execution of Kritx and judge them too quickly – think about the idea that they are trying to exploit. There are millions of passionate user reviews on blogs today of everything you can think of – movies, music, books, resaurants, etc. Just do a technorati search for “review” and whatever you are looking for. Of course, initiatives to better organize blog data, like structured blogging and microformats, will make this data even easier to index and present to users. kritX is combinging blog reviews and microformats with a vertical search engine to present these edge reviews to users. It has a long way to go. Authors must use microformats and tell kritX that they want their posts included (neither of these things are really necessary). But it is a good idea that can grow into something incredible. All the data is just sitting out there on the open internet, ready to be harvested. See also Blogcritics, who do something similar (although they do not require microformats, they do require author registration at the site). The plethora of ads on Blogcritics do get in the way of the user experience, though. → Read More
This mashup certainly caught my eye – The Beer Hunter. Unlike California, where you can buy alcohol just about anywhere until 2 am, parts of Canada have very restrictive alcohol laws – its hard to find a place to buy it, and the hours of operation are erratic. I know this because I lived in Ottawa a couple of years ago. I fondly remember the fascist-like Liquor Control Board of Ontario and it’s near-overwhelming control over alcohol in Ontario, Canada. Well, Janis Mussat is helping. She’s created a mashup of Google maps and local alcohol outlet hours of operation. If you live in Ontario, this just may become your home page. → Read More
Riya, the celebrated facial recognition company that has allowed in a few lucky alpha testers over the last few months, was the subject of significant acquisition rumors a few weeks ago. “Sources” put the price in the $30 million range, although the company was understandably silent, even during their launch party a few days later. Tonight, Founder and CEO Munjal Shah finally addressed the acquisition rumors around Riya on his blog, stating flatly that Riya continues as an independent company: For the past few months, there have been many speculations about our future as an independent company. For various legal reasons I couldn’t and still can’t directly comment on these. However, at this time, Riya continues as an independent team fully focused on making our photo search dream a reality. Robert Scoble just wrote about this as well, admitting that Microsoft took a look at Riya (passing on the price), and expressing his hope that they’ll take another look now that the Google deal has fallen through. Either way, I’m just looking forward to the product finally shipping. Munjal says that will be at Demo in February. And as an interesting side discussion, Peter Rip, a Riya investor (and a friend of mine) takes us all down a notch (TechCrunch is specifically mentioned) saying “Every report was factually incorrect at the time it was printed. I did not see one accurate characterization of any discussions Riya.com may or may not have had.” Ouch. But this can’t be entirely correct – Robert has confirmed in his blog that Microsoft met with Riya and passed on the deal. So at the very least, acquisition discussions were taking place. → Read More
I recently wrote that the Ajax desktop space was getting crazy-crowded. That was before Google released their desktop widget API and favoor launched. And now we have a developer release of a new ajax desktop called Pageflakes (available only in IE). Pageflakes has a number of features – rss reading, email checking, note taking, searching, etc. It also has a developer API to allow third party module-creation. Given that Microsoft and Google have this feature, it is a must have to even get in the game. Pageflakes says it is easier to develop modules for their site than for Microst Live or Google – Developers can use MS Visual Studio and they support ASP.NET and Atlas (modules can also be build using PJP or JSP). Of course, overcoming the user loyalty of Netvibes (now a significant source of TechCrunch daily traffic) and the network power of Microsoft and Google will be very difficult. My current count of ajax/flash desktops is nine: Eskobo favoor Google Goowy (Flash, not Ajax) Microsoft Live Netvibes Pageflakes Protopage Zoozio Who am I missing? Who’s lucky number 10? At this point I’m just writing about these for the fun of it. → Read More
Oodle a vertical search engine for classified ads, is set to add events as a category in the next week or so. Oodle’s current categories include For Sale, Cars, Housing, Jobs and Services. With events, they will have the ability to pair revenue-generating services such as ticket sales and related items with the classifieds. Oodle clearly needs to find new ways to generate excitement. Traffic is flattish and they recently lost the feed from Craigslist, an important source of classified ads. Oodle is all about decentralized content, a theme I constantly talk about, and I’m in their corner. I hope they find a way to make their model work. → Read More
Google has just released a set of components called Libjingle that allow third party applications to interact with Google Talk. The components, which include some source code, are being released under a very liberal license allowing for free incorporation into commercial and non-commercial software. We are releasing this source code as part of our ongoing commitment to promoting consumer choice and interoperability in Internet-based real-time-communications. The Google source code is made available under a Berkeley-style license, which means you are free to incorporate it into commercial and non-commercial software and distribute it. In addition to enabling interoperability with Google Talk, there are several general purpose components in the library such as the P2P stack which can be used to build a variety of communication and collaboration applications. We are eager to see the many innovative applications the community will build with this technology. Below is a summary of the individual components of the library. You can use any or all of these components. * base – Low-level portable utility functions. * p2p – The p2p stack, including base p2p functionality and client hooks into XMPP. * session – Phone call signaling. * third_party – Non-Google components required for some functionality. * xmllite – XML parser. * xmpp – XMPP engine. Google has done a great job with spurring Google Maps mashups – some people claim hundreds of thousands of third party applications. This code release is even more important and is a huge end around Skype. In fact, Google has basically put a gun to Skype’s head and demanded they now release their API as well. Skype allows integration with the Skype client. What Google has done goes far beyond this, allowing integration with the Google Talk’s VOIP network. Here’s an example of a potential mashup – putting google map location information in the same application as google talk, allowing mapping of everyone in the conversation (Gizmo does this). See local businesses and people and add them to the conversation. → Read More
I’ve received dozens of follow up emails to a post I wrote last month called Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist). Today I saw another one, from Joe Mendoza, announcing the imminent launch of podtranscript, a service which will transcribe podcasts for publishers. This was no. 8 on my list. Hi Michael, I read your blog entry titled “Companies I’d like to profile (but don’t exist)”. In point number 8 you mentioned podcast transcription. I read that almost jumped out of my skin, I mean, it was sheer co-incidence. Here, I just reserved a domain name www.podtranscript.com a week or two ago and was toying with the idea of launching a podcast transcription service, and almost out of the blue a mention of the concept is made in TechCrunch. I am offering podcast transcription service from www.podtranscript.com. Right now we are not offering a fee based service. Instead we are offering a sample service where our visitor can request a transcription for a 15 minutes podcast, for free. The paid service will be launched soon. I was thinking of hiring somebody to review and suggest a price for transcription, and I scrapped the idea after reading your blog . I went aheadand priced service at $10 for every 30 minutes of audio or video or both. My site is at http://www.podtranscript.com Thanks Joe Mendoza Joe is following my recommendation (which I pulled out of thin air) and will charge $10 per half hour of audio or video. A key issue will be turnaround time – I’d be willing to pay premium for very quick transcriptions. Podtranscript will join castingwords in a rush to see who will launch first with this business. → Read More
Meebo confirmed the rumor that they have received funding from Sequoia Capital on their blog. Congratulations to everyone involved. No real details yet, but I’m hearing that the pre-money valuation was $9 million, not $10 million as I originaly reported. I assume the investment was in the $3 – $4m range. → Read More
If Google Music Search isn’t for you, check out MusicStrands, a young company that relaunched its site yesterday. The company is based in Corvallis, OR (where is that?) and Barcelona, Spain. MusicStrands had results for every band I threw at it. Lots of stats, and links to buy music from amazon and iTunes. And it has excellent web 2.0 features as well, including social networking, recommendations and user tagging of music. They also have nice support options for small and indie bands, allowing them to get their music into the mix. Basically, MusicStrands is an excellent resource for finding new music. UPDATE: Klim points out in the comments that Google, unlike MusicStrands, also does lyric searches. Good point. → Read More
It certainly isn’t the much anticipated Google Music Store, but today Google started to incorporate music information into normal google search results in the same way they incorporate movie and stock information. If Google recognizes the band, album or song, they will put results at the top of search. Now you can search for a popular artist name, like the Beatles or the Pixies, and often Google will show some information about that artist, like cover art, reviews, and links to stores where you can download the track or buy a CD via a link at the top of your web search results page. Om says he found lots of obscure music, but my favorite band from college isn’t included. Google is currently linking to iTunes, Rhapsody and others to purchase music as well as reviews from select sites on the web. This is, of course, a good first step in putting together a music store. Let’s see where they go with this. → Read More
I just got back from back-to-back (to back) holiday parties and the rumors are flying that Meebo, which I wrote about a couple of days ago noting their stellar growth, has closed funding from Sequoia Capital at a $10 million pre-money valuation. I have not confirmed this with the company and it could be inaccurate. That’s quite a valuation for a company that is barely 12 weeks old. → Read More
I swore to myself that I wouldn’t write about Ajax desktops for a while (and held steady even though this launched), but today I’m breaking that promise, because Google just did something really cool with their customizable Ajax desktop. The desktop was launched on July 25 and can be accessed at google.com/ig or by clicking on “Personalized Home” on the Google main site. As reported by Google Blogoscoped, Google has released a very simple developer API to allow anyone to create and host modules that people can add to their Google homepage. The API is available here. A module is an XML file and can be an extremely simple piece of code. Most of the modules have been created by Google employees at this point. The directory of available modules is here. I’ve stated before that opening up the API and allowing third party modules is a great idea for just about every web 2.0 product, and ajax desktops are no exception. Microsoft did this with Live.com (directory is at microsoftgadgets.com), and has a ton of third party created widgets available. Google’s home page has evolved significantly since July. In addition to news and RSS modules, users have the option of pulling in gmail links, weather, etc. It’s a useful application. On a related note, Stephen Bryant has an excellent summary of the ajax desktops out there (although it is already dated with this Google API news). → Read More
New York City
New York City
San Francisco, CA
