January 4, 2008
Dooflets. Doofspace. DoofPulse. Doof. What is doof? According to Wikipedia doof is a type of outdoor dance party in Australia. The Urban Dictionary defines doof as a foolish person. While I may be a fool, I am not in Australia and the doof I am referring to is actually a fun little social startpage built around casual gaming.
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October 25, 2007
LinkDoozer, an online bookmarking startup, offers a way for users to easily add and save bookmarks in a startpage-like approach. Unlike typical social bookmarking sites that look for users to add as many bookmarks as possible LinkDoozer focuses on users adding only the sites they like the best and encourages users to rate and review site. With social networking aspects LinkDoozer lends itself to easy link sharing similar to other social bookmarking site.
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October 2, 2007
BAAGZ launched this past week at the DEMOfall 2007 conference to offer a social take on the personalized home page or startpage built on search. Built on the idea that "baagz" are a collection of sites, feeds, notes, videos and photos, Baagz enables users to organize and share their favorite stuff.
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September 27, 2007
Mixx launched last week to offer up a social news site for the mainstream to explore. Founded by Chris McGill, Mixx aims to offer a place for large publishing companies to get into the social media space.
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September 13, 2007
While there are a number of Web 2.0, Ajax, personalized home page products that leverage syndication for content updates. I recently found three applications that seem to lean towards a more minimalist visual bookmarking startpage approach. In this article, I will take a closer look these products, so as to point out some alternative approaches to the classic personalized startpage.
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August 9, 2007
Global Grind, currently in private alpha, is a New York-based web 2.0 personalized home page startup that is said to be focused on the "hip hop" generation. Being a "hip hop" listener I was curious to see what this intriguing value proposition was all about. Driven by curiosity, which was said to have killed the cat, I was expecting Global Grind personalized home page to bounce with a Jay-Z hip hop beat or something. That was not the case, Global Grind is a personal home page product with parity with a number of personalized home page products on the market (i.e. widgets, drag and drop, etc). I thought that some of its design element decisions and button placements were a little odd.
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July 22, 2007
Photo of the Week: I took a trip to Sausalito yesterday and took in some gorgeous sites including this little red sailboat in the Bay. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.22.07 Google Maps: A users guide to personalization LifeHacker offers a guide to personalizing Google Maps. The Impact of Facebook's Platform...
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July 15, 2007
Photo of the week: These green frog cupcakes were spotted and then were quickly devoured at the most recent TECH cocktail in Chicago. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.15.07 AOL Top Web Site Under New Ranking Nielsen/NetRatings will begin reporting total sessions and total time spent on a site in order...
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July 14, 2007
Pimping your ride, ripping your jeans, popping your collar and putting lime in your water are all expressions of your personality. Thus you are personalizing your experience. Your web experience can also be personalized making it your web. Personalization is all about you. Jen Consalvo, Director of Personalization at AOL,...
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July 1, 2007
Photo of the Week: I spotted this sole mushroom while visiting 'the country' in Illinois. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.01.07 iPhone Mania Turns To AT&T Activation Hell The iPhone caused quite a stir and it appears Apple handled demands very well as it was almost too easy to get the...
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June 19, 2007
So you want to organize all your stuff on the web in one place? A new myAOL is coming soon. The current myAOL is solely a feed reader that offers some recommendations. The new myAOL offers a personalized homepage experience with some additional bells and whistles. Aside from an Ajax...
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May 27, 2007
Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by James Yu at Pier 38 in San Francisco on Thursday night (May 24, 2007) as part of the NewTeeVee and MetaCafe Pier Screenings. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.27.07 Facebook Moving to An Open Platform Strategy Facebook has announced a new strategy...
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May 22, 2007
Rootly, a news aggregator site, has relaunched with new site design and additional features. With the help of Marshall Kirkpatrick who has been guiding Rootly looks much improved. It now looks like a news start-page. The new and improved Rootly offers highly customizable RSS feed powered vertical news search based...
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May 20, 2007
Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Brian Solis of a video camera recording Sarah Meyers interviewing someone at the May 2007 Girls in Tech in SF. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.20.07 Watch TV Stations From Your Web Browser More and more services are popping enabling users to...
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May 13, 2007
Photo of the Week: While in Santa Monica, California this week for Twiistup I decided to get up early on Wednesday to go down to the beach and snap this shot. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits 05.13.07 Facebook to Launch Classifieds Service Social network Facebook is set to launch a classified...
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May 6, 2007
Photo of the Week: This was the view from Sweet View on Derby Day at Wrigley Field in Chicago, Illinois. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.06.07 Microsoft to Buy Yahoo? Nope. Stung by the loss of Internet advertising firm DoubleClick to Google last month, Microsoft has intensified its pursuit of a...
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March 25, 2007
Photo of the Week: The trees are blooming faster than web 2.0 startups these days. I snapped this photo, titled Flowering with my camera phone, while at the AOL Mountain View, California office this past week. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.25.07 Under the Radar Office 2.0 Winners I had a...
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March 18, 2007
Photo of the Week: This is a photo I took in my old neighborhood in Lincoln Park in Chicago prior to moving on to AOL in Virginia. Happy St. Patrick's Day! Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.18.07 Viacom Drops a $1 Billion Nuke on Google Remember when Napster was a lawsuit...
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February 25, 2007
Photo of the week: With the 79th Academy Awards tonight I felt this photo title Over Hollywood Sign by Jorge Mir offered a good point of perspective. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.25.07 Hollywood Disrupted By Social Media? An opinion piece in the LA Times, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”,...
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February 18, 2007
Photo of the week: Create a 2 gigabyte ChapStick as explained by The Machinist. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.18.07 Patent Monkey: Yahoo Ready to Smash Up the Mash Ups Yahoo was recently granted a patent that could cause a bit of a shake-up to other web portal companies if acted...
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February 4, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.04.07 First things first, today is Super Bowl XLI and I am from Chicago which means I will be rooting on the Bears today. The photo above shows the Merchandise Mart in Chicago supporting the team by shining the team's orange and blue colors. Go Bears!...
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December 31, 2006
It has been a great 2006, as Somewhat Frank has offered up over 400 articles which attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors. I thought it might be interesting to reflect on some of the best of 2006 as we look forward to 2007. Here are some of the most popular...
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September 3, 2006
The Internet has changed a lot in the last twenty years as the days of the flat world wide web have been replaced by the interactive live web. Personal homepages, one stop shops for news updates, calendars, email and everything else, have become more prominent as the web has become...
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