SOMEWHAT FRANK

ffwd Social Video Discovery Site

ffwd or "fast forward," a San Francisco-based startup formerly known as "Vadver," recently launched into private beta looking to offer users a discovery mechanism for online videos. ffwd is the brainchild Patrick Koppula, former COO of music recommendations site iLike. I got a chance to take a closer look at the private beta and provided some analysis. 

Pentagon Hacked, iPhone Announcements, Facebook People Search, 10 Web Trends, Delicious Preview, MyStrands Music Video & Netscape Digg Clone Gone

Photo of the Week: I took this photo of Red Sox on the gates of Fenway Park while visiting Boston this weekend for TECH cocktail Boston.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 09.09.2007

Sk*rt A Social News Site For Women

Women looking for a place to find interesting content recommendations should look no further than Sk*rt. Sk*rt offers a social news site of "pure goodness" which is geared towards topics and interests that women might like. The platform which could be deemed a Digg-clone offers content discovery via social recommendations.

Are You A Shareaholic?

Shareaholic makes it easy to submit the web page you are currently viewing in a Firefox browser to Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Google bookmarks, Magnolia, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Twitter.

SmartLink Feeds Added To AdaptiveBlue

AdaptiveBlue, a startup that focuses on a smarter browsing experience, has created feed output for its SmartLinks functionality. This is feature called appropriately, SmartLink Feeds will make it easy for anyone to take the feed from a SmartLinks widget and display it on their blog, website or personalized homepage. SmartLinks are collected via AdaptiveBlue's BlueOrganizer. According to AdaptiveBlue CEO, Alex Iskold:

"Anyone can create SmartLinks feeds with BlueOrganizer and instantly publish stylish lists of their favorite things."

Aside from allowing users to add their own links, AdaptiveBlue will also publish and update popular SmartLink Feeds for anyone to paste into their own sites including, New York Times Bestsellers, Netflix Top Rentals, Amazon Hot Gadgets, iTunes and others.

Shuzak: A Social Network For Geeks?

Shuzak a social network startup devoted solely to geeks caught me off guard. Do geeks need a social network when there are thousands of social networks on the web filled with geeks? Nonetheless, I registered for Shuzak to see what exactly it was all about. I filled out profile and then Shuzak tried to match me with some that I would have "Karma" with. For geek defined check out this video.

Skype Outage, Google Health Coming, Social Money Management, Social Network Tools, New AOL Mobile, Slowing Down The Web & TECH cocktail Boston

Photo of the Week: This photo titled WEB 2 OH is an artistic take on a license plate I spotted earlier this week.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 08.19.2007

MetroProper: Give Props To Local Scene

MetroProper, a Chicago-based startup founded by Philip Tadros, will soon be launching into the public beta, after an extended private beta period which started in July 2006. MetroProper is a social network for business or personal profiles with citizen journalism in cities around the world.

Facebook Source Code Leak, Porn 2.0, Spock Launches, Personalize Jib Jab, Change of myAOL Heart & Startup Tips

Photo of the Week: A couple of Maine Lobstahs! from a surf & turf event I attended on Friday. It doesn't get a whole lot more "summer" than this.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 08.12.2007

Social Bookmarking Explained

Social Bookmarking is a common Web 2.0 term as there are lots of sites offering great products available. However, not everyone is riding the Web 2.0 express train and staying up on all the lingo and ideas. Therefore, many people may not know what "social bookmarking" means. Common Craft has created a video (below) that explains Social Bookmarking in Plain English.

Things You Want or Have Get BoxedUp

Looking to make it easier to for people to keep track of the items that they want BoxedUp.com offers a place to help users shop and share for items that they may want.

Founded in London by Chris Osborne and Jeremy Baines, the three employee team has recently morphed and rebranded its product from Gifttagging.com, a site focused on just gift lists, to a more general social shopping and list sharing site called BoxedUp. With similar but not identical products to Wishlistr, Shoposphere and Stylehive, BoxedUp offers the ability to easily create personalized wish-lists for products, pull in Amazon wish-lists and bookmark products while surfing the Web via a nifty Firefox extension. The Firefox web browser extension offers easy bookmarking and access to existing wish-lists one click away. In addition, BoxedUp offers social networking friend lists and users can also access other users wish-lists and items when looking for recommendations. The site positions recent activity (i.e. added items, etc) in a scrolling wall for users to monitor what community members are doing in the community real-time. Items can be tagged and a tag cloud of popular items is also displayed for users to discover new things.

BoxedUp looks to leverage Google AdSense and targeted results from a shopping search engine the BoxedUp looks to generate revenue from the high degree of relevancy in the results as it primary revenue generator. In using BoxedUp, its ability to pull in prior Amazon wish-lists and easily add to my list I definitely see how it could become a repository for keeping track of the items I want or need. You can check out my BoxedUp profile (shown below) and add me as a friend - oh and don't forget to send me something from my list of "Things I want" too. I will be waiting. :)

Streakr A StumbleUpon Clone?

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 out the screen-shot below of the StumbleUpon and Streakr toolbars stacked on top of each other (click to enlarge).

Streakr also offers a profile page which allows users to post favorite sites, latests rates sites and likes and dislikes which probably all go to help educate Streakr's personalization profile. StumbleUpon has a similar concept as users are able to add friends and share content recommendations among them. My Streakr profile page is shown below.

It appears I am not the only one who is seeing a resemblance as TechCrunch also noted the commonalities to StumbleUpon and even went as far as to say it say that the product's social networking aspects are a clone of MySpace. Ouch!

AOL Named Top Site, myAOL Beta Released, Facebook a Fad?, Widgets Evolution and Formats, Tagging Tools, Blogging From Hobby To Fame and iPhone Hackers

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 to figure out site popularity putting AOL on top of the rankings and bumping Google down to 5th.

AOL Launches Three New myAOL Products In Beta
AOL launched a suite of personalized products into beta: myPage (personalized home page), Mgnet (image-driven content discovery and recommendation engine) and Favorites (feed reader and bookmarking). All three services can be accessed via tabs on the main myAOL page.

Facebook and the Working Adult: Fad or Revolution?
Web Worker Daily investigates whether or not Facebook in the working world is just a fad or here to stay.

The Tagging Toolbox: 30+ Tagging Tools
Tags - for some, one of the best ideas on the web, for others, merely a visual distraction. Mashable investigates a number of tagging options.

Google Adds Mapplets: Widgets for Google Maps
Google is unveiling what they’re calling “mapplets". Mapplets are essentially widgets for Google Maps which can integrate and manipulate Google with HTML, Javascript and Flash content.

The Evolution of Web Widgets: From Self-Expression to Media Companies
Read/Write Web takes a look at how web widgets have evolved from cool, viral toys of self-expression to important big media tools.

Basic web widget formats
Anyone publishing widget content online should know a few basic concepts shaping their decision and choose the right mix of software and content based on their target. Niall Kennedy covers some of the basic advantages, disadvantages, and considerations for each type of widget content and bring you up-to-speed on a few current widget deployment options.

Google: Viacom's Built to Sue
Google's CEO Eric Schmidt took a swipe at Viacom Friday, saying the company was "built from lawsuits" and pointed to its litigious history. Schmidt's comments were made to reporters at a hotel bar at the annual Allen & Co. meeting of media moguls.

iPhone Hackers: "we have owned the filesystem"
This could be problematic.

Perez Hilton gets show on VH1
The sharp-tongued celebrity gossip blogger has apparently been meeting with someone over at VH1. Another example of how blogging creates a platform to do just about everything.

Turning Blogging From Hobby to Career
Richard MacManus runs the world's 28th most popular blog, Read/WriteWeb, from his home office in Lower Hutt. It's every blogger's fantasy. Mr MacManus started a blog on web technology as a hobby back in 2003. Blogging can pay. Congrats Richard, keep up the great blogging!

Personalization: It's All About You

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, recently spoke to a group at Web Content 2007 in Chicago, Illinois on June 19, 2007. Jen presented on how to create a personalized web and gave a sneak preview of the recently launched myAOL personalization suite. You can watch some video tidbits from the presentation above.

AdaptiveBlue Smart Browsing Experience

AdaptiveBlue, a company founded by Alex Iskold a contributor to Read/Write Web, offers a couple of different ways to create a smarter browsing and personalized experience by connecting users with an array of services.

By leveraging Mozilla's platform AdaptiveBlue has created BlueOrganizer, a Firefox extension that makes it easy to collect, manage, discover and share information matched it to real-world things like movies, wine or electronic gadgets. BlueOrganizer's wide spread utility makes it difficult to pinpoint a concise product category but it does offer users easy access to a number of content-based utilities. BlueOrganizer up by saying it is a bookmarking product that offers service related information based on what you are looking at (both past and present) on the Web. Users can use BlueOrganize to save, rate and organize the sites and items that they like. If you are too lazy to bookmark you can turn on an "Auto BlueMarking" feature that automatically saves pages a user has visited a set number of times. This feature could come in handy but can be turned off by the user if found to be cluttering their saved items.

AdaptiveBlue also offers SmartLinks as a way for publishers to surface links to relevant information. SmartLinks take advantage of affiliate programs to offers publishers a monetization option that is similar to putting sponsored links on a site. In similar way that Sphere's "Sphere It" widget adds related blogosphere content to an article, SmartLinks add value to an article by connecting users with other relevant information about a specific item. My only concern with SmartLinks is the time it would take a publisher to add them to their content, since it currently is a very manual process. AdaptiveBlue might address this in a similar fashion to "Auto BlueMarking" by integrating a simple rules system into existing publishing platform thus removing the extra work which could be considered a barrier of entry.

Finally, AdaptiveBlue offers something called a SmartLinks Badge. Publishers can use the badge to display items that they like and want to share or recommend with their readers. You can configure a SmartLinks Badge here. Of course, you can hook your badge with affiliate programs to potentially generate some revenue from your favorite items.

Bottom-line: AdaptiveBlue offers a couple of different ways of connecting you with relevant information about a particular item via an link on a page, a page badge or a web browser plug-in.