May 24th, 2006

Wine Lovers Now Have A Web 2.0 Site

WineLog, a new site for wine lovers, just launched. It’s a site that has user generated information on wines, including tags, ratings and comments. The content is not deep yet, and users are encouraged to add more wines to the database (a new wine entry is moderated before appearing on the site). But there is enough content there to show that this will be a site that wine lovers will be passionate about. I am, also, hopeful that it will tap into a new market of people who may not yet be familiar with “web 2.0 sites”, and introduce them to tagging, RSS, comments, etc. If you find a wine you like, you can add it to your own wine log. These pages have a permanent public URL for sharing (privacy is promised soon, along with RSS, blog widgets and other features). You can also send information on any wine entry directly to your cell phone via a text message. The service is still very rough and I have a number of nits/suggestions. Wines are browseable by type (red, white, etc.), variety and region. I’d like to be able to browse by winery as well. Clicking on tags from there will show other wines I might like, too. Another nit: when you leave a comment on a wine, it does not appear in your wine log. you have to leave a separate comment there. There are also a few navigation bugs. But overall, I like the site and the service. At the very least, its significantly more useful than the personalization options offered by Winespectator for a fee. → Read More

May 24th, 2006

SuperOyster: Monetizing the Waiting List

Starting today, Seattle-based SuperOyster is showing some very early alpha code to users. The service, which was profiled earlier this month on O’Reilly Radar, has an innovative and controversial business model: allowing people to buy and sell their places in line on a waiting list. The prime market for this is professional sports, where waiting lists to buy season tickets are sometimes decades long. If a team integrates the SuperOyster solution, fans on the waiting list will be able to buy and sell those positions to each other at prices determined by the overall market. I think this is a good thing. Today, people pay for waitlisted goods by waiting. Time has value, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be allocated like other assets – according to a market. People who value time less will be willing to wait. Those who value it more, won’t. Others will disagree, arguing that “one of the few vaguely egalitarian experiences left in our increasingly commoditized world is standing in line and taking your turn” as one commenter stated in the O’Reilly post above. And Marshall Kirkpatrick points out another issue with SuperOyster: “…isn’t a certain amount of the hipness quotient mitigated by the public knowledge that you didn’t get into the soiree because you were hip enough to know about it first – but because you bought out some one else who did?” Whatever your position, this stuff is coming, and the Internet is continuing to destroy persistent market inefficiencies. → Read More

May 24th, 2006

My Pick List adds Myspace Widget

MyPickList is a new service that launched earlier this month. It allows users to create a list of items they would recommend to others, linked to merchants that sell those items. I wrote about it pre-launch here. They are creating tools to easily create the lists and publish them on websites. My Pick List has affiliate relationships with the merchants (current list is here), and gives publishers a cut of any sales that occur from the list. It’s similar to Yahoo’s Shoposphere, although Yahoo does not yet share any revenues with the publisher. For publishers, it’s an easy way to promote things that they recommend and earn affilite fees without having a direct relationship with the merchant. My Pick List keeps about 60% of the revenue, though, which in my opinion is too much and needs to come down over time. The site could use a few evolutions on design, but they are rolling out new functionality regularly. They have just released a quick widget creation tool for Myspace users, shown in the screen shot. If My Pick List can find a way to get through to these users virally or through a partnership, something like this could potentially become quite popular. → Read More

May 23rd, 2006

New Features at Live.com Local Maps

The online map wars continue to escalate, as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask.com and Mapquest compete to release new features – some aimed at usability, and some designed to be just plain sexy. We compared the online maps last month and thought Yahoo was the best overall, based largely on the inclusion of traffic data and the flexibility of their APIs. This morning, Microsoft will swing back with significant upgrades to its own Live.com Local maps product. Currently Live.com offers a wide variety of viewing options: “Road” (normal maps view), “Aerial” (satellite and high altitude airplane pictures), “Bird’s Eye” (low level aircraft, at an angle) and “Street Side”, a visually stunning street level view of the map. Apart from Street Side, users can toggle between the three viewing options, zeroing in on their intended location. Microsoft Virtual Earth Program Manager Steve Lombardi walked me through the new and upgraded features late yesterday and sent me some screen shots which I have included here. In summary, the changes include: “collections” feature has been significantly expanded and integrated with Live.com favorites Addition of traffic flow information Expansion of “birds eye view” outside of the U.S. to include parts of the U.K. → Read More

May 23rd, 2006

Jobster To Acquire (two month old) Jobby

Seattle based Jobster will announce the acquisition of brand new startup Jobby on Wednesday morning. Terms are not being disclosed. I profiled Jobby when it entered it’s beta in late March. Unlike Indeed and Simply Hired, which aggregate job listing from other sites, Jobby takes resume information directly from Job Seekers and then invites employers to search through listings. Jobby also allows employers to search for highly specific skillsets and subscribe to future results via RSS. I gave Jobby a thumbs up: the Ajax interface for filling in skill/resume information, along with the excellent search features results in a really cool user experience. It will be interesting to see how Jobster integrates Jobby into its existing solutions. Jobster has raised over $20 million in venture capital. Investors include Trinity Ventures, Ignition Partners and Mayfield. → Read More

May 23rd, 2006

Google PPC Video Ads – Why I'm Betting Against It

Google will launch a new pay-per-click video ad product and syndicate it out through its Adsense Network today. Like Google’s normal text ads, Advertisers will bid for placement and will be charged when a user clicks on the video. A graphic will appear on the website displaying the ad. The Google blog post on the product is here. Worse, it appears that publishers that show adsense ads cannot opt out of showing video ads. Here’s my initial impression: this won’t be popular for advertisers, publishers or viewers. First, Google needs to eat its own dogfood. It won’t be placing these ads on their own sites for now. Why? Perhaps their early testing showed that consumers don’t want to click on these nearly as often as significantly less intrusive text ads. Or perhaps Google just doesn’t want to sully its super-clean site with this stuff. Either way, without Google search, advertisers will be significantly less interested in the product. Second. When someone clicks on a video, they aren’t clicking through to a website, where some sort of action can occur that can be tied to an ROI. People like Adsense becasue it can result in sales or other trackable actions. Videos don’t do that. Even though the web is making multi-media drop dead easy, people still like text (and that’s why blogs are interesting to a lot more people than podcasts). Third, small businesses already have a wonderful way of getting normal television ad spots produced and run. SpotRunner will help small businesses create an ad and run it on normal television for extremely low prices ($44 for ESPN in central California, for example). Fourth, people don’t want to click on video ads. They don’t want to watch this stuff at all, really. And if a company comes up with a really cool ad, like Honda’s wonderful “Cog” ad, it’ll spread virally. They don’t need to pay users to watch it. Fifth, Producing a video ad takes work. It’s easier than it used to be, but it takes a lot longer than producing a text ad. Only a fraction of the Adsense advertiser base will be willing and/or able to participate. This will drive down the auctioned ad prices per keyword significantly. Sixth, all of these factors are going to contribute to low PPC and click through rates. Adsense partners won’t make as much money as they would from normal text → Read More

May 22nd, 2006

Time.com Adds "Sphere It" Links

San Francisco-based blog search engine Sphere is less than a month old, and already has links to its “Sphere It” functionality embedded in a number of time.com articles (example). Tony Conrad, Sphere’s CEO, says that they are currently testing the feature with Time.com. The links are prominently placed below the headlines of articles and link directly to Sphere blog search results related to the topic. I wrote about Sphere It in my initial profile of Sphere – under “more tools” near the end. Sphere It is a Sphere feature that allows users to find relevant blog content from any URL. The easiest way to use it is to install the Sphere It bookmarklet into the browser. Click it while on any web page and relevant Sphere blog search results will be brought up. Unlike Technorati’s “Technorati This” feature, which shows blog entries that link to the URL being searched, Sphere It doesn’t report links. Rather, it does a semantic analysis on the text within the page being searched and returns blog results that it finds relevant to the article. For more on the difference between Sphere It and Technorati This, see Sphere CEO Tony Conrad’s blog post here. To see an example, the Sphere It results for the above article, on General Michael Hayden’s nomination to head up the CIA, returns these Sphere blog search results. A quick perusal shows what I consider to be very relevant blog content. The speed of the search, which is done in real time, is also impressive. While this type of exposure is excellent for new startup Sphere, it’s also great for the blogosphere. I would imagine the average Time.com reader is not fully aware of what blogs have to offer in terms of breaking news and (often) intelligent commentary. This should drive more mainstream Internet users to the blogosphere over time. The Sphere It bookmarklet is available here. → Read More

May 22nd, 2006

Download Your TV – The Current Options

Downloadable television, first made popular by Tivo and its competitors, is compelling stuff. As consumers become accustomed to watching a show whenever they choose, pausing at will and fast tracking through commercials, tuning in to a station at a scheduled broadcast time seems quaint at best. Today, 7% of U.S. households have a digital video recorder, or DVR and most cable companies offer a DVR as an option. File trading networks, such as bittorent, are also extremely popular (if sometimes illegal) choices for consumers wanting access to time-shifted television content. While DVRs are great, content producers and distributors are less than thrilled by the loss in revenue from all those skipped commercials. Also, DVR’d shows cannot be easily transferred to mobile devices or otherwise viewed away from their home television. Some consumers want more flexibility and options. Enter downloadable television, spearheaded by iTunes. On October 12 2005, Apple introduced iTunes 6.0 which added support for purchasing and viewing of video content from the iTunes Music Store. iTunes initially offered a selection of several thousand music videos and five TV shows, including most notably ABC’s Lost and Desperate Housewives, as well as the collection from past seasons. New shows are available 24 hours after the initial broadcast. Since that time, the collection has expanded with NBC Universal, USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel shows, and Viacom, in addition to further Disney-owned networks’ shows. iTunes also gives the ability to view Apple’s large collection of movie trailers. Format for purchased Videos is 128 kbit/s Protected MPEG-4 video. By January 2006, iTunes offered over 40 television shows for download, including, most recently, additions from Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and MTV with episodes of such shows as the Daily Show, Spongebob Squarepants, South Park, and Punk’d. Showtime added some content in February. The networks, though, are hoping that iTunes will not be the only way people watch TV on their computers. CBS, Fox and ABC are all experimenting with their own direct downloads or streaming. ABC ABC is offering streaming versions of a number of its hit shows to viewers within the U.S. for no charge: Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias, and Commander in Chief. The shows are viewable in 400×700 Flash format. On the plus side, ABC’s offering is browser and platform agnostic, and are free. On the minus side, and these are big ones, you must be online to view the show. You can’t take these → Read More

May 22nd, 2006

Bebo Closes $15M Financing

San Francisco based Bebo popped a few bottles of champagne and announced a very healthy $15 million round of financing, led by Benchmark Capital. Bebo is one of the largest and fastest growing social networks, with 24 million users and 2.5 billion page views per month. More from PaidContent and Jeff Clavier. This is a deeply funded market niche. Market leader Myspace is owned by News Corp. Facebook is funded to the hilt. Friendster is backed by Kleiner Perkins (and Benchmark before the recap). Newcomer Tagworld raised a healthy $7.5 million from DFJ. And tagged, focused on much younger audiences, raised $7m from Mayfield. Bebo is focusing on non-U.S. growth, particularly the UK. That makes a lot of sense. The U.S. market is completely saturated between Myspace and Facebook. Update: Jeff Clavier has a post that clarifies Bebo’s numbers. → Read More

May 21st, 2006

Feedpass Does Absolutely Nothing

There has been a lot of debate about a new service called Feedpass over the last couple of days. Feedpass, like Feedburner, will take any RSS feed URL and convert it into something more manageable. For example, I created a TechCrunch feed at Feedpass – compare it to my standard Feedburner feed. Feedpass’ value proposition is that they add Google adsense advertisements to the feed landing page (but not into the feed itself), and they will share that revenue with whoever created the feed URL at Feedpass. For example, anyone can create their own TechCrunch feed, distribute it, and get a cut of any adsense revenue generated from it (note that anyone can create a feed on Feedburner from anyone’s RSS, too). This has angered a number of bloggers who see it as hijacking their content for commercial purposes (which is exactly what it is). As an example, someone, not me, created this version of the TechCrunch feed. Any clicks on ads on that page do not result in revenue flowing through to TechCrunch. If you actually claim the blog, showing that you own the content, you will receive a higher cut of the advertising revenue (2/3 instead of the basic 1/3). This does not, however, stop people from creating other versions of your feed on Feedpass and distributing it for their own gain. There are a number of legal and other issues that the Feedpass model raises. Is it fair use, or copyright infringement? I don’t know, I’m not an IP attorney. Is it ethical? I don’t think it’s particularly unethical. The posts within the feed clearly point back to the original content, so we aren’t in splog territory. But it definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth. In the end this just can’t compete with Feedburner, a much more robust solution for publishers. Feedburner provides stats and other tools that Feedpass doesn’t have at this time. And adding ads to the landing page for a feed isn’t that interesting, either, because the point of that RSS landing page is to turn the visitor into an RSS subscriber, not to generate revenue (Feedburner, I noticed, has dropped their one ad from that page, good for them). Note: if Feedpass inserted Google adsense ads directly into the feed, things might be more interesting from a publisher standpoint. So in the end I’m not particularly outraged, I’m just ambivalent (as → Read More

May 20th, 2006

Mytago: A Real/Online World Bridge

Like Mozes, Mytago is trying to find an easy way for people to tag real world stuff for interaction online. The idea is to create a visual tag (see image) that can be included on a website or, more usefully, somewhere offline like a poster. People who view the Mytago tag can take a picture of it with their camera phone and email or upload it to Mytago. Whatever metadata is associated with the Mytago tag will be bookmarked on the user’s account. In lieu of taking a picture of the image, users can just email in the code that’s included with the tag. Stats are available for each tag, so the creator can see how many people have bookmarked it. And users can comment on any tag. Is Mytago a winner? I don’t think so. Given how easy it is to put up a website, I don’t know why people wouldn’t just put up a site with whatever information they like, and include a web address in their offline poster or other stuff. I’m writing about it because I like the experimentation, and Mytago caught my eye. I think the Mozes solution, which addresses this market in a different way and without any requirement for a visual tag, may have legs. My review of Mozes is here. Update: Nana and Mark Devlin left comments that talk about QR Codes in use in Japan that look very similar to Mytago tags and that are readable by cell phones. Having the ability to have your phone directly understand the code makes all of this stuff more interesting. We’ll see if/when we get something like this in the U.S. → Read More

May 20th, 2006

Contemporary Character Design: Mojizu

Occasionally I’ll come across a new site that has no practical use (for me), but I loiter for one reason or another and just have fun with it. Irvine, California based Mojizu is that kind of site. It is an interactive community for artists and doodlers to showcase and discuss contemporary “character designs” that they’ve created. An individual character is called a “Moji” Artists upload character images, which are displayed immediately. The community can view the designs, comment and rate them, and generally provide feedback. There is also a fun “Moji War” area where two characters are pitted against eachother to see which one is more popular. The winner moves on to further rounds, with cash prizes available to the ultimate winners. Merchandise is also available through the MojiShop. Proceeds are split with the artist. → Read More

May 19th, 2006

Yahoo to Test Finance Widget in June

Paid Content and Steve Rubel report that Yahoo Finance will begin testing a new widget that will allow bloggers and other websites to put real time stock quotes and charts on their sites. Initial testing will begin in June. Publishers will be able to select any combination of quotes, charts and news. Up to ten companies can be included, and there are at least two options for customizing the chart. This isn’t something I’d include on TechCrunch, but there are a lot of blogs and websites dedicated to discussing certain public companies. It’s perfect for them. → Read More

May 19th, 2006

vpod.tv Raises $5.1 Million: First Look

I mentioned vpod.tv, a startup headquartered in Paris and Madrid, in my Innovate 2006 roundup. Today they are announcing a $5.1 million Series A round, led by Frédéric Humbert of Innovacom. vpod is a “best of class” service, in the rapidly evolving and increasingly crowded video sharing space. vpod is doing things that no one else is with transcoding, editing/display and monetization. Frankly, the online video space is getting so crazy that I put off a demo of the product from founders Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz and Ivan Communod until the end of the conference. The real winner seems to be Adobe – its new Flash development platform is so robust that everyone seems to be developing their own video product, and most are basically variations on the same thing. vpod may be different. It’s based in Europe, which will give it an advantage as the U.S. players beat eachother up – they can grow European market share in the meantime. Also, like Revver, vpod is focusing on monetizing videos. vpod will allow advertisers to easily create advertisements, and play them on their own websites and/or insert them into users’ videos. Ads will be inserted at the beginning, middle or end of videos and will range from 10-60 seconds long. Users can opt out of ads by paying a fee. By opting in, they’ll receive a revenue split from vpod – something in the 50% range. This is further than what competitor Revver has announced to date. But vpod also shines in other areas. They take video from almost any source and, more importantly, transcode for almost any device. Want Mpeg-4 for the PSP? vpod will let you download that format. Mpeg for the iPod? You can have that too. Just tell vpod your device and it will give you the correct format. And finally, the tools for creating your own “channel” on vPod are stunning. The only Flash is around the player. Everything else is javascript and dhtml. They allow, for example, resizing of boxes by dragging the mouse, something I’ve only seen in Flash previously. vpod is in private beta. Sign up on the home page. They are allowing people in slowly, ramping up for a fall launch. In the meantime, if you have some time to kill, check out my after-three-cocktails video interview with Rodrigo here. Screen shots (more are here): → Read More

May 19th, 2006

Europe Shows Its Stuff: Innovate 2006

Dozens of (mostly) European companies showcased their new consumer web applications at Innovate 2006 in Zaragoza, Spain this week. As usual with conferences like these, the companies were young, rough and hungry. And I see a lot of potential with at least a few of them. I’ve summarized my favorites below and look forward to profiling these individually. Also, I’ve taken a few days to hang out in London with entrepreneurs. If you are here, we are having an open event on Monday, May 22. Details are here. The prevailing topic of conversation at the conference was “Can Europe become more like silicon valley?”. I’m not an expert on this topic, although I’ve lived in London and Copenhagen and have spent a lot of time in Europe over the last few years. But I do have a number of observations. These are generalities, and some of them are applicable to certain geographic areas. The UK, for example, seems to be doing better than the other European countries when it comes to encouraging startups. And a lot of cool stuff is coming out of France even though starting and running a company there is, to say the least, daunting. First, entrepreneurs in Europe are not revered in the same way as the U.S. Many people in Europe consider entrepreneurs to be greedy and arrogant, trying to reach above themselves. That has to change. Entrepreneurs tend to ignore risk/reward ratios, drive economic growth, bring new jobs to a country. They should be encouraged, not socially chastised Second, the complexity of creating a corprate entity, hiring employees and raising capital needs to be reduced. It’s simply too hard to create a company and get started. Third, taxes must come down, or entrepreneurs will continue to flee to the US and elsewhere. So back to the main reason for this post…here are my favorite companies from the Innovate 2006 conference: ReadSpeaker ReadSpeaker is a Spanish company. They provide websites with a plugin that creates a “say it” button on the site. Press the button and the page is read to the reader. Highlight text before pressing the button and just that text is read. Lots of supported languages to choose from. vPod.tv vPod.tv is headquarted in Paris and Madrid that is yet another video sharing site. I’ll be writing more about them later today, but there is something realy special here. They have a → Read More

May 18th, 2006

Friendster Mobs – Web Chat Coming

Since ceding social network dominance to Myspace in 2004, Friendster has gone through massive reorganizations, countless consultants and three CEOs. Even a Kleiner partner fell due in part to his mismanagement of the company at the board level. However, under the current leadership of Kent Lindstrom, one of the founders (and CFO until taking over early this year), Friendster is making a comeback of sorts. It turns out the key to making the social network work was pretty simple: creating a scalable architecture that served pages fast, and allowing users a degree of freedom in creating their pages (instead of a rigid hierarchy that leaves all pages looking more or less the same). The result? A steady and impressive growth in page views since Kent took over. So it isn’t unexpected that Friendster would copy yet more features of long time rival Myspace. And instant messaging is next. Myspace launched an IM client (Windows only) earlier this month, to generally positive reviews. Friendster’s version, which is in development, will be web chat, not a downloadable client (“Meebo” style). I am getting conflicting reports on this: one source says that the service will be created in partnership with Los Angeles based Userplane. Another says its being built offshore by the company itself. Either way, I have early, rough screen shots of the product, below, and not much more information. → Read More

May 17th, 2006

Feeds 2.0: A little like Searchfox

There are a number of exciting European startups in the consumer web space that presented at the Innovate 2006 conference in Spain this week, and I’ll be writing about a number of them. The first is Athens, Greece based Feeds 2.0, a new RSS reader in private beta that reminds me a lot of Searchfox, the now-defunct personalized news reader acquired by Yahoo earlier this year. The reader is definitely rough and in need of further development, but the personalization engine is rock solid and will be popular with some users. Feeds 2.0 monitors what you like and dislike about individual posts in your feed list and presents posts to you based on what it thinks you will want to read next. Attention information comes in via what you read (clicking on the title or expand buttons), what you mark as good (similar to Rojo’s Mojo feature) and what you mark as uninteresting. All of your feedback is run through their algorithm, along with feedback on those posts from other users, to help determine what order your posts are shown to you. The personalization features alone will be enough to convert some users, but I like Feeds 2.0 for other reasons, too. You can view content on a feed by feed (bloglines) basis, or via a river of news view which ranks all content in reverse chronological order (and by personalization if you have that turned on). They auto-generate descriptive tags for each post, helping you find content via a tag cloud for all unread posts. I’d like to see them add the ability for users to social-tag content as well. But the basic result of the tagging/tag cloud feature, along with personalization, is the ability to quickly find interesting content in a sea of new posts. One other feature that I’d like to see – a three pane view option which many users, myself included, find to be a superior way to view RSS content. Also, Feeds 2.0 is available in any of five languages – English, Spanish, French, German and Greek. For non-English speaking users, Feeds 2.0 may be one of the few choices available to them in their first language. Sign up for the private beta on the Feeds 2.0 home page. → Read More

May 17th, 2006

eBay Bans Rapleaf Links

Rapleaf is a new feedback and reputation startup that aims to be the open version of eBay feedback. For more information, see my initial profile and launch post. Rapleaf is a product that I strongly endorse and believe in (and I asked for something like this last year in this post). In what I see as a good sign for Rapleaf, eBay appears to be selectively removing listings from sellers who point to their Rapleaf reputation profiles: From: auended@ebay.com Date: May 16, 2006 5:53 AM Subject: eBay Listing Removed: Inappropriate Links (=LS &12362 JM10590049) To: [redacted]@gmail.com Date: Mon, 15 May 2006 14:54:23 PDT Dear [redacted], We appreciate that you chose eBay to list the following listing(s): [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] However, your listing was in violation of eBay’s Inappropriate Links policy and has been removed from eBay. We have credited all associated fees to your account and notified eBay users associated with the transaction that it has been cancelled. We would like to take this opportunity to let you know what part of your listing is not permitted. Your listing(s) contains the following information: http://www.rapleaf.com/profile/view/[redacted] http://www.rapleaf.com/profile/view/[redacted] http://www.rapleaf.com/profile/view/[redacted] eBay does have complicated rules for what type of outside links may be included within a post (see policies here). However, these rules are rarely enforced and there are countless examples of policy breaches that do not result in a listing being terminated. For example, see this listing for the sale of search engine DigForIt, which contains numerous third party links and which also clearly violates eBay’s linking policy. In this case, it seems clear that eBay does not want Rapleaf’s new reputation system encroaching on their territory. And by banning links to Rapleaf, they may have just given them the marketing push that the new startup needed. → Read More

May 16th, 2006

AOL to Release YouTube Clone

Prepare for the launch of AOL UnCut (currently in open beta), a near perfect clone of YouTube. The service is powered by Video Egg (see Josh Kopelman for more). Videos of up to 5 minutes can be uploaded to the service, and they are then converted to the Flash format (same as YouTube). Like YouTube, videos are rated, commented and shareable. Also, any video may be embedded into another website via a code snippet. The only significant difference between AOL Uncut and YouTube is that YouTube supports tagging, whereas UnCut doesn’t. This is right on the heels of the launch of AIM Pages, which is directly targeting Myspace and other social networks. Look for a launch in the next week. I am seeing an increasing trend of the big guys simply copying what successful startups are doing. AOL with this product and AIM Pages. Google with Google Notebook and a flurry of other projects, etc. The only large company that is even experimenting with unproven concepts at this point is Microsoft with its various Live.com ideas. I’d like to see more experimenting at the big company level. → Read More

May 16th, 2006

Google Notebook Launches: Ho-Hum

You no longer need to see the pre-release screenshots: Google Notebook is now live at google.com/notebook. As I mentioned in my previous post, Google Notebook is a direct Del.icio.us competitor. You can bookmark content (a web page or a piece of content on a web page) either via normal Google search (click on the “note this” link at the bottom of a search result), or on the open web with an IE or Firefox extension (highlight text, right click). Once content has been bookmarked, you can add a note and categorize it. No tagging (and no multiple categories per item) are supported. However, I like the clean drag and drop Ajax interface for organizing bookmarks. Multiple Notebooks can be created and any or all of them can be made public. There is a search function that can be used to search across your own Notebooks, or all public Notebooks. But… The lack of tagging is important: it is natural to be able to tag a piece of content to make searching easier in the future – its unclear why Google doesn’t support this proven model for describing bookmarks. My final thought is this: Google Notebook will have some level of success just because it’s associated with Google, and built directly into search results. Like Aim Pages, I do not feel that it is a particularly inspired product, or one that I would give much of a chance if it didn’t have Google backing it up. Del.icio.us would have been a perfect acquisition for Google, right down to the user interface which is very Google-like. For whatever reason they let it go to Yahoo. I suspect that over time they’ll regret that decision. I also wonder about Google’s dedication to its own projects. For example, what will be the fate of Google Bookmarks now that Google Notepad has launched? Google Labs is littered with half baked and half finished products. I see little or no product vision coming out of Google, sitting fat and arrogant on it its Adsense revenues. → Read More

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