SOMEWHAT FRANK

Filtrbox Does Widgets For Olympic Team USA

With the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic games ready getting underway you might be looking to stay up to speed with the action. Filtrbox, a Boulder, Colorado based TechStars startup and previous TECH cocktail demoer, is looking to help you keep track of all the USA Teams' news by launching a new widget offering. The widget is not just your normal feed widget as it showcases the power of persistent search and noise control to offer up everything it can find about the USA Olympic team. There is lots of stuff from lots of sources ranging from NBC to bloggers point of view and everything in between.

The new widget launched is a desktop widget that runs under Adobe AIR, and a Flash widget for your blog. Both are totally free and easy to install. Check out the Team USA widget as you cheer Team USA on to gold or create your own custom widget based off your filtrs.

Video: Clearspring Widget Startup Explained

Clearspring, a Virginia-based startup, offers a number of widget solutions for publishers and advertisers. I got to catchup with Clearspring Community Manager and genunine good guy, Justin Thorp as he "tells all" about the widget making startup. Is Clearspring soon to be acquired? Watch the video and maybe you will find out.

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How Does Friend Connect Put Users In Control?

Google will be launching Friend Connect tonight to turn the open Web a place for open social apps to run wild as a motivator adoption mechanism for the new Google Gadget 2.0 format with OpenSocial across the Web. With Google powering email and search and collecting user data, I wonder about this new social component and about user controls. I did not get a chance to ask this question on the call due to what may have been technical issues but regardless I wanted to throw it out there to the blogosphere to give their SOMEWHAT FRANK perspectives on the following:

  How Does Google Friend Connect Put Users In Control?

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below if you have a SOMEWHAT FRANK opinion.

NIN Challenges Music Business Model, Biofuels Compared, Widget Format, Google Reader Sharing Notes, Twitter Tools & Avatars

Photo of the Week: This photo of tulips taken by Melissa Goodman would somewhat frankly make a nice gift for mom as I wish all the moms out there Happy Mother's Day.

SOMEWHAT FRANK Weekly Tidbits: 5.11.2008

IfbyPhone Launches Free Calling On Facebook

Now you can make free calls to your friends from your Facebook profile thanks to IfbyPhone, a Chicago-based telephone application platform company that has created Phone-Me-Now.

Phone-Me-Now gives Facebook friends free "click to call" functionality without disclosing their caller ID. I am not really sure if that is a good thing or not but I guess it depends on your objective. I would think it would play to the advantage of a telemarketer but I guess it could be nice to call your friends without disclosing your phone number in case you are trying to keep it private. The Phone-Me-Now application takes advantage of Ifbyphone technology to enable all types of phones (i.e. mobile, VoIP or rotary) to connect via the Web and enables inbound, outbound and click-to-call telephone applications with integrated interactive voice response dialogs.

Six Apart Improves Offering, Building Real Businesses Anywhere, Hubble Photos, Startpages Trend Social & TECH cocktail DC 2

Photo of the Week: This photos was taken at TECH cocktail DC 2 on Thursday evening in Washington D.C. you can check out the full TECH cocktail DC 2 Photo set.

SOMEWHAT FRANK Weekly Tidbits: 4.27.2008

OpenSocial Foundation Formed, Tips On Making Great Mobile Apps, Twitter Monetization Issue, Value of Widgets & Are Newspapers Dead?

Photo of the Week: With spring upon us, the cherry blossoms are in bloom around the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. this week.

SOMEWHAT FRANK Weekly Tidbits: 3.30.2008

CBS Launches Rev-Share Ad Network

CBS Television stations today announced the launch of the CBS Local Ad Network as it looks to get into the advertising and widget distribution game by connecting with local bloggers and social media sites on the Web.

At first glance, I thought CBS was looking to incorporate blogs and other social media content into the local CBS news sites but after reading on that is not the case at all, it turns out CBS is just leveraging bloggers looking to generate some revenue on their blog or social media content. Network participants can place what CBS is calling a widget (with a huge skyscraper ad unit) on their sites and in return receive a rev-share. The widget pushes links to only CBS content rather than tying in social media content like I thought it should. Nothing new here. It might be the right program for bloggers or social media content producers looking for a way to monetize and not sell ads though I have no idea what the rev-share looks like and it would be worth a look before jumping in and giving CBS ad impressions.

MyBlogLog Rolls Out Glossy New Widget

MyBlogLog, the blog community creating site operated by Yahoo which I previously reviewed, has rolled out a slick new community widget. The widget offers a glossy finish and "flyout" upon hovering on community member photos which displays details and contact information. It seems MyBlogLog has simplified the widget configurations by removing a number of features and customizations.

According to a recent post by Ian Kennedy on the MyBlogLog blog, the new widget was graphically inspired by Arlo Rose who created Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator). I like the new look and so I promptly updated the widget on Somewhat Frank.

AOL Gets Goowy, Acquires Widget Startup

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.

Lemonade Stands Go Online To Make You Money

I spent many summer days as a child attempting to sell lemonade to anyone that passed by. I cannot say it was that lucrative a business and recall spending a lot of time waiting and waiting for lemonade customers. Aside from a solid suntan from my hours spent waiting I also learned that lemonade stands are all about location, location, location. Lemonade has taken the idea of the "lemonade stand" to the Web making it easy to recommend items you like on sites where you already have visitors.

Knols Announced, Clearspring Widget Ad Network, YouTube Partnership Program, Mahalo Social Search & Coding Monsters

Photo of the Week: I witnessed the Penny Harvest first hand this past week in Rockefeller Plaza in New York City as they look to raise 100 million pennies for charity. The river of pennies was pretty amazing - I have never seen so many pennies in one place.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 12.16.2007

Userplane Partners With TV Sites

Userplane, the web chat and community tools provider, has announced today that they are working with network and cable TV media companies to rollout social networking and messaging services within their existing online communities to kick off online conversations. Userplane's deal includes Channel 4 (UK), The CW, FUEL TV, and the Independent Film Channel as they will be adding the Webchat, Minichat, and Webmessenger applications to their online communities.

Google Getting Into Everything, NewsCorp To Buy LinkedIn?, FireFox 3 Beta, Death to E-mail, Popular Twitter Clients & Don't Text-N-Drive

Photo of the Week: With the Thanksgiving holiday this past week I ate entirely too much and encountered situation shown above several times. I am glad that Marc Levin captured it on film with this photo titled member of the clean plate club.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 11.25.2007

Poll: Thoughts about Google's OpenSocial API?

This week the Web development community has been buzzing as details were released about a new widget API called Google OpenSocial. Google officially launched OpenSocial and provided this video to further explain its actions. I have been trying to get my head around what it really means and would like to open it up to my readers for input via a Somewhat Frank poll to get your take on OpenSocial.