February 4, 2008
AOL has just announced the acquisition of Goowy Media, a San Diego-based Flash startpage, widget and desktop application startup. One of Goowy's bi-products is yourminis a slick startpage that I previously reviewed and named one of the best beta products of 2006. It is pretty rad.
Goowy's widgets can be distributed to just about any page or social network on the Web (as shown below) which is comparable to offerings by ClearSpring, Widgetbox and Gigya, which have also been getting buzz in the widget advertising space. These distribution capabilities will come in handy on myAOL as well as helping to syndicate AOL network content. Goowy also offers widget metrics in a dashboard that closely resembles the feed metrics dashboard of FeedBurner which was acquired by Google for $150 million.
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January 31, 2008
myAOL, the personalized startpage suite, has added a little more personal flair to its offering by launching the ability to select themes or skins for each page or tab on your personal dashboard. Now in addition to changing the background color users can select from one of six themes.
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October 27, 2007
I spoke a few weeks ago at the Widget Summit in San Francisco on a panel dedicated to discussing the personal homepage space. The session was an hour long discussion with a cast of industry experts. I had a chance to get ahold of a video clip of my introduction. Additional footage will be coming out soon but I wanted to preview this video introducing myAOL to the Widget Summit crowd.
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October 15, 2007
I spent the day at the 2007 Widget Summit today as I spoke on a session about Personalized Homepages. The day was filled with some excellent session about, as you might guess widgets of all ways, shapes and forms. Widget Summit closed day one with a launching pad.
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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 26, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending August 26, 2007.
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August 12, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending August 12, 2007.
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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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August 5, 2007
Photo of the Week: Barry Bonds hit home run 755 last night in a game vs. San Diego tying Hank Aaron for most career home runs in Major League history. John Feeley was in attendance and captured history with his zoom lens in this shot (shown above). Somewhat Frank Weekly...
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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 20, 2007
SportSnipe, a San Diego-based startup, recently launched to offer an aggregation of sports content from across the Web. SportSnipe aggregates over 1,360 feeds and looks to be expanding is collection daily. All feeds for NCAA football will are said to be coming soon. SportSnipe is aimed to provide users a...
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July 17, 2007
Streakr just rolled into beta to offer a content discovery toolbar and social networking product. You may experience deja vu when exploring Streaker as it might remind you of StumbleUpon. The Streakr toolbar offers a couple of different ways to discover and rate content that map directly to StumbleUpon. Check...
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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 11, 2007
If you have an iPhone you may be trying to figure out a way to optimize your widget experience. Mojits offers a potential solution as it provides a place to find web widgets optimized for the iPhone. Currently, Mojits offers a couple dozen web widget options which include AIM iPhone...
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July 10, 2007
Today myAOL, a personalization product suite, has officially been released to the beta. As the myAOL Product Manager, I feel like our team just gave birth to triplets, as myAOL offers up three applications into one integrated dashboard experience with various levels of personalization. We hope you like it. I...
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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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June 3, 2007
Photo of the Week: Need for Speed, taken by Marina Campos Vinhal expresses how I have felt, as the last three months have been a blur with days, weeks & months flying by with all the conferences, travel and work. I woke up the other day thinking, what just happened?...
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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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April 29, 2007
Photo of the Week: Keyboard infestation could happen to anyone of us. Thanks to bhollar for capturing the moment on film. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.29.07 Newsvine Relaunches... Announcing Evergreen Mike Davidson proudly announced the first major overhaul of Newsvine since launching a little more than a year ago. It...
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April 22, 2007
Photo of the Week: I snapped this photo of the West Wing while celebrating Earth Day 2007 on the White House grounds. eBay Acquires StumbleUpon StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay for between $40 to $75 million but it seems Google Google tried to rain on their parade with a toolbar...
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April 15, 2007
Photo of the week: This San Francisco Trolley photo taken by, friend and co-founder of TECH cocktail Eric Olson, was the first photo I found on Flickr related to the Web 2.0 Expo this week in SF. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.15.07 The Web 2.0 Expo Is Upon Us I...
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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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March 11, 2007
Photo of the Week: This photo of a robot titled bleeplaps by Eric Skiff was taken at SXSW which is going on this weekend in Austin, Texas. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.11.07 My Yahoo! Gets Web 2.0 Makeover Just as Yahoo CEO, Terry Semel hinted at last week, the new...
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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 22, 2007
Yourminis, a Flash-based personalized dashboard of widgets created by Mark Cuban-backed Goowy Media, has been making some aggressive changes since its launch late in 2006. Yourminis offers users one of the most customizable homepage experiences I have seen to date as it leverages Flash to present desktop-like features on the...
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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 11, 2007
It rained quite a bit this week in Silicon Valley so I thought this photo titled rain on tuesday taken by Daisy Romwall was appropriate. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.11.07 The Wizards of Buzz The Wall Street Journal took an in-depth look at some of the social bookmarking sites that...
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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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November 26, 2006
The way that people read their content has been evolving as online syndication has spawned a number of different content reading approaches. Firefox introduced live browser bookmarks and IE7 recently added the feature to integrate feed reading into the web browser. A number of online and desktop-based feed readers round...
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November 11, 2006
Widgets Live! was a fabulous day of festivities (November 6, 2006) which attracted the thought leaders of the web, mobile and gadget industries to discuss one of the hottest topics, widgets. Companies like AOL, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Adobe all had representatives contributing details on its latest widget endeavors. A...
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November 6, 2006
I just arrived in San Francisco after a long evening of traveling for a week of web 2.0 festivities. I am attending a widgets festival conference tomorrow called Widgets Live which I previewed previously. The conference was organized by Niall Kennedy and Om Malik (thank you both for pulling this...
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October 12, 2006
I recently highlighted the activity of widgets in the web 2.0 space. With the number of players jumping into the widgets space, I concluded the article by saying: "An open standard development infrastructure which would allow a single widget to be plugged into any application and work properly seems to...
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October 4, 2006
Widgets have become a hot topic in the web community lately as a large number of sites are allowing users to personalize their experience. The term widget can be used interchangeably with gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake but for the sake of simplicity I will use the...
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September 15, 2006
Fred Wilson, technology VC, recently compared MySpace today to AOL of the 1990's by saying: "I've said several times in this blog that MySpace is the "AOL of blogging." I see blogging as the most open form of social media so that's why I used that term. MySpace made it...
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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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