SOMEWHAT FRANK

What is Ficlets?

Ficlets recently launched a community to allow users a place to let the creative juices run free. What is a ficlet? By definition:

"A ficlet is a short story that enables you to collaborate with the world."

Once a ficlet is written and shared, any other community member can pick up the narrative thread by adding a prequel or sequel. Like a "choose your own adventure" story, with Ficlets you know where the story starts but you don't know where the story will end. So if you start a story you might want to keep checking back to see where the rest of the community takes it. Ficlets are short stories so they range between 64 and 1024 characters.

Ficlets looks to inspire ficlet writers by offering story starters, story enders, this day in history and Flickr photos. Users can search by tag for inspiration. Ficlets is a creative, longtail site that I could see ficlets being extremely compelling to creative writing students and educators.

Ficlets was developed by a small team of AOL developers as part of the AIM Network. Interestingly, Ficlets is AOL's first OpenID site that doesn't not rely on creating a AOL /AIM screen name to use it. According to a recent post by AOL developer Kevin Lawver:

"Ficlets is very much an experiment (we like to call it "a prototype we just happened to launch"), and this is our very first release (we're the first product in AOL to roll out on Rails, so we've still got stuff to learn about it...). So, things may go weird and wonky from time to time. Just give it a minute, and then reload."

For information and updates on Ficlets be sure to check out the Ficlets Blog.

Go Green Web 2.0 Style

As scientists recently drafted a report that describes a dire outlook for planet Earth, the effects of global warming on the planet have literally been a hot topic (no pun intended) and even made a recent stop at the 79th Annual Academy Awards. However, there are a number of environmental or "green" web sites focused on improving the situation. This article will showcase some of these movements that I have encountered recently.

18Seconds.org - Devoted to informing the world about the energy savings associated with switching from a normal light bulb to a compact fluorescent lamp. The campaign is based on the idea that is only takes 18 seconds to change a regular light bulb to an energy saving compact fluorescent light bulb.

EcoGeek - A site devoted to monitoring and exploring the current explosion in technology designed to mitigate our impact on the environment.

Greener - A search engine that could come in handy if you are looking for green products, services, organizations and information. Currently the green search engine boasts that it is search over 9 million sites and 50 million links.

greeninternet.org - As you surf the web, energy providers supplying power to your computer are burning fossil fuels and emitting harmful carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere. By pairing web surfers with sponsors, greeninternet.org looks to offset the environmental effects of surfing the web.

Gigoit - With the tagline of "Choose to Reuse" Gigoit offers anyone a place to get rid of unwanted items without having to resort to filling up a landfill. If craigslist doesn't work I would give Gigoit a try.

Hugg - Taking some inspiration for the popular web 2.0 social news site, Digg , Hugg offers users the ability to recommend green news to be rated by the rest of the Hugg community.

TerraPass - Helps counter the carbon dioxide emissions created by your lifestyle… and you don’t even have to leave your computer!  Just plug in your car’s information, your flight plans, your energy bill, etc. and TerraPass crunches your carbon dioxide output.  No it’s not just to make you feel guilty; this site also enables you to donate an amount to alternative energy sources to offset your damage.

TreeHugger - There are number of green blogs but if I had to pick on to stay tuned to for the latest in environmental or "green" news, tips and updates it would be TreeHuggers. TreeHugger recently partnered with Daylife to create The TreeHugger GRNDX which is the first "green index". It works like the stock market index, except that instead of tracking stocks, it tracks mentions of certain key green phrases in the media as a way to gauge how much mind-share certain concepts have week over week. TreeHugger offers number of other resources some of which include a set of how to go green guides which range from how to green your car to how to green you sex life.

Are you doing anything online to help the environmental movement and "Go Green?" I'm sure I left a few organizations or green products, out so please add others you know of in the comments section.

A Community For COLOURlovers

Do you love color? COLOURlovers is an online community that monitors and influences color trends. It offers an open source and common license approach to color for users to contribute, find and rate various web colors and palettes.

COLOURlovers could act as a handy tool for designers, artists and color enthusiasts to work with colors in new ways and quickly find their inspiration by searching, sorting and filtering through keywords to a color scheme that interests them. Currently, (March 14, 2007) there are 9,484 community members that are sharing 131,799 colors in 52,268 palettes. That is a lot of color! An example color palette can be found below.

COLOURlovers.com is a project of Lord IV, Inc. and is run by creator Darius A Monsef IV.

Bottom-line: COLOURlovers is an online community that unites designers, artists and color enthusiasts to share, track and innovate with color.

What Is In Your Tumblr?

Looking for a place to aggregate your thoughts in a scrapbook fashion online? Tumblr is a simple microblog platform and might be just what you are looking for to post your thoughts, images and videos. Tumblr offers a six different types of posts which include: a regular post, quote, photo, video, conversation and link. Unlike other conventional blog platforms, Tumblr does not offer comments, thus making Tumblr more like a one way log than a conversation. Eric Rice calls Tumblr a hybrid of twitter and WordPress, but it is more than just that as you can integrate a number of feeds and thus create your own customized personal aggregator.

Tumblr is a product of Davidville, the small New York web development firm that has also brought us Senduit, the simple file sharing product and Channel Frederator, the original cartoon podcast.

I created a Tumblr log called Totally Frank to aggregate my activities on Twitter, Stylehive, Last.fm and Flickr. You can find other Tumblr logs by tuning into the Tumblr Radar, an aggregation of recent Tumblr posts.

Sphere It Widget Aids Content Discovery

Sphere, the blog search engine that launched in May 2006, has been steadily disseminating and connecting the web via the "Sphere It" contextual widget. The widget has grown in popularity as it helps readers offer content recommendations from the blogosphere, as well as related content from current sites. It ultimately drives page views both for the author site as well as the entire blogosphere. The widget can be seen in the blogosphere on a number of popular blogs (i.e. TechCrunch, GigaOm, Andrew Sullivan Daily Dish, Publishing 2.0, Cool Hunting, Captains Quarters, Mathew Ingram, Read/Write Web, Battelle Searchblog, Venture Beat, O'Reilly Radar, Techdirt, Infectious Greed, etc).

Sphere's contextual widget is not only popping up in the blogosphere, Sphere has a number of partners (i.e. AOL, Market Watch,  NYT, ZDNet and TIME among others) representing nearly a billion article page views, which means Sphere is both reaching a much broader audience of Internet readers than just the early adopter tech crowd. Ultimately, Sphere and its "Sphere It" widget helps readers discover new blogs, and in the process drives page views.

The Sphere team was recently gracious enough to create a version of the widget for Somewhat Frank. It was added over the weekend and can be found at the end of each article. Upon clicking the "Sphere It" link an overlay dialog box should appear with recommendations and related content as shown in the screen-shot below.

With the "Sphere It" contextual widget you can be reading Somewhat Frank and click the widget for related content. You can then click one of the recommended blogs in the lower left quadrant to jump to Read/Write Web or GigaOm and then read one of their articles and click their "Sphere It" widget to bounce to the next site. I hope you enjoy bouncing around the web discovering new sites and content with the help of Sphere and it's "Sphere It" contextual widget.

New My Yahoo Beta Reactions, Google Phone, Feedbase Preview, ClearSpring Funded, Free Wi-fi & 5 Design Principles

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 My Yahoo Beta was launched this week to offer an drag and drop experience that mirrors the current Yahoo home page. There were a number of media reactions to the product. Steve Rubel feels that the new My Yahoo is abandoning the geeks. Erick Schonfeld thinks Yahoo is chasing web 2.0 dreams. While Greg Linden explained how Yahoo will be adding more personalization to My Yahoo.

Freebase Will Prove Addictive
Freebase, launched this week to create an online database, is to centralize as much data as possible to allow participants to freely add and access data - developers can extract information from Freebase via a set of APIs and add it to their web applications. This application, if true to its mission, could be huge.

A Roundup of Tools & Applications For Developers
Brian Benzinger pulls together a hardy list of web applications for project planning, system administration, usability testing, collaborative development, and web services to help "Developers, Developers, Developers…".

Criteo’s AutoRoll: What Readers are Reading
Eric Olson showcases a new blog widget by Criteo called the AutoRoll that displays links to blogs that your readers should like similar to the way MyBlogLog offers up popular links in each blog community. Based on each unique reader's affinity for each specific blog, the Criteo Recommendation Engine will compute on a real-time basis the relative affinity of all blogs.

Google Phone: Team of 100 working on Blackberry like….?
Is Google planning to follow Apple's lead into the phone industry?

Clearspring Raises $5.5M for Widget Service
ClearSpring, the Arlington, Virginia-based widget marketplace, which helps content owners widgetize and widget makers hook up with web and desktop distribution platforms, has raised $5.5 million in its second round of funding, for a total of $7.5 million raised.

Start-up to launch FREE wireless network in Silicon Valley
Meraki Networks, a Mountain View, California-based start-up is planning to build a free wireless Internet network in central San Francisco, and all residents have to do is put a small wireless router supplied by the company in their window or rooftop, to bring free wireless Internet access.

Five Principles to Design By
Web designer Joshua Porter gives five principles he designs social media web sites by.

Newsgator Online Beta: Better Than Before - Still Not Good Enough
Marshall Kirkpatrick gives his perspective on the recently released Newsgator online feed reader beta product.

Feedable Puts a Memetracker in Your RSS Reader
Steve Rubel reviews the new Ajax feed reader called Feedable and expresses his liking of its "memetracker" feature. The "memetracker" is built right in and shows you what the hottest items of the day are.

Election 2.0

With a number of political candidates creating MySpace profiles, YouTube videos and Second Life avatars it appears that the Internet and web 2.0 technology are being leveraged for political campaigning.

TechPresident, a project of the Personal Democracy Forum, launched recently to aggregate the activities of U.S. presidential hopefully on popular web 2.0 social media sites. Aside from a blog which gives perspective on the presidential race, TechPresident also tracks each candidates MySpace friend counts, YouTube videos, and Technorati mentions and Google and Yahoo ads. I would love to see it add Second Life (virtual world) and Twitter (micro-blog platform) to the mix as candidates also appear on these sites.

The video below titled, Election 2.0, explains just how the 2008 United States election will be like no other election as web 2.0 takes on an unprecedented role. My only critique of the video is that it breaks the "context before detail" rule which would have made the message more powerful. Nonetheless, I think it is well done and worth watching.

Twitter Is All About What You Are Doing

What are you doing? Twitter, a product created by the Odeo team, is a microblog  social networking site aimed at finding an answer to that very question.

After seeing Twitter a few weeks ago and wondering why I would ever want to give people a constant flow of Frank Gruber updates I decided to finally do a more thoroughly examination. I started sending messages and found that there are lots of my friends and blogosphere colleagues using the product. I found utility in the fact I can subscribe to a feed of all my friends to stay connected. Though Twitter offers SMS alerts of your friends updates I decided to opt-out of that option as I already receive enough SMS alerts as it is. Nonetheless, I think Twitter offers a good way to stay in the loop with your friends. Due to its laid back, instant messaging feel, I would caution users about what gets posted to Twitter, as it is going to be on the Internet for all to see.

It appears Twitter has had some problems with its rapid growth as it has been struggling through some performance issues. At least they are having fun with it, as it recenlty offered up the error page below.

You can find me on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/somewhatfrank
Drop in and leave me an update, what are you doing?

AOL Launches Slick Web Mail Beta

Sporting a French gray color palette, AOL recently released a new AOL Mail Beta (codename: Cayman) to update the current web-based email product. It offers a clean Ajax interface extending a users usable space and making it easier to manage and organize large quantities of email. It is pretty slick. The biggest notable improvement is that messages can be read inline rather than via a pop-up window. However, if pop-up windows are your thing, than you can also opt to open messages in new windows. Users can now access email more quickly as the AOL Mail Beta has removed a click from the process. There are a number of additional interesting features including a right pane that give users quick access to "to do lists", "contacts" and even "celebrity gossip" via TMZ.com. Just remember, this is beta so there are some known issues that will be corrected before the product is ready for prime time.

AOL offers free email accounts and 2GB of storage space and you can even select your own personal email domain. I am extremely pleased with the new web mail product and would urge you to give it a try. I'd love to hear what you think.

Disclosure: I am an AOL employee. I do not work on AOL Mail but I am the product manager for two other AOL products.

Share2Me Makes Sharing Web Sites Easy

The web is a great place to find and share information. I regularly share information about new web 2.0 products and services on Somewhat Frank. Throughout each day, I also share links with friends, family and co-workers via email or AIM. Share2Me aims to enable users to share right from their browser limiting cross application interruptions. Share2Me offers a simple browser extension that makes it quick and easy to share links via email, MySpace, AIM, and Facebook.

Share2Me offers to aggregate your address lists from a number of different sources to place sharing links just a click away. Upon installing the extension you can write a message and send it along your friends.

Share2Me then saves the shared item into a message queue for future reference and sends the message to the contacts of your choice in a well formatted email message (shown below). I like the way it pulls in a thumbnail screen-shot of the shared item - a nice touch.

Bottom-line: Share2Me offers users an quick and easy way to share items from the web directly from the browser.

Good: For People That Give A Damn

Good is a media company aimed at creating a platform for the ideas, people, and businesses that are driving change in the world. Good, an L.A.-based company founded by Ben Goldhirsh, offers up a print magazine, feature and documentary films, original multimedia content and local events.

The print publication is a work of art as the photos and compelling articles are extremely well done making is difficult to think there is only a month worth of prep time between issues. Good Magazine makes if feel good to become a subscriber as 100% of your subscription cost goes to help the participating charity of your choice. With a goal set of 50,000 subscribers and $1 million dollars given away by mid 2007, Good is about a quarter of the way to its goal.

On the web, Good covers a number of my favorite topics and makes it easy to filter to specific categories like Technology,  Art & Design, Business & Money and Media. Good employs an "It's Good" Digg-like rating system on each article in addition to offering RSS feeds by topic. In addition, Good has created close to a dozen video shorts on a number of different topics. The first video in the SplashCast below is titled, Paying for Your Attention points out how much advertisers are paying for your attention.

Good will be teaming up with Creative Commons, a Good supported organization, to host a party at South By Southwest Interactive on March 12, 2007. If you are headed to Austin for the event I recommend you check it out - judging by its NYC launch party I am sure it will be a GOOD time.

Is Your Site Mobile Ready?

Is your site mobile ready? .mobi has launched, ready .mobi, a mobile-readiness test to help site owners. You simply put in your URL and using industry best practices & standards you find out if the site is mobile ready.  Unfortunately, Somewhat Frank is not currently fully mobile ready. You can visit the Somewhat Frank Mobile Version but it currently is only detecting and redirecting users visiting the site with Windows CE over to the mobile version.

Eric Olson previously wrote a piece explaining how to setup a mobile version of your site leveraging the FeedBurner BuzzBoost feature and simple server level http redirects. This method works wonderfully if you have server level access. Somewhat Frank is on Typepad, the SixApart hosted blog platform, and does not enable the same server level access as host it yourself solutions. Typepad does not  currently offer an out of the box mobile browser detection solution. I contacted TypePad support about it and JavaScript was mentioned as an option but no clear details were given so I found some JavaScript to handle Windows CE users. If anyone knows of other mobile redirect solutions that could be implemented on hosted blog platforms like Typepad please let me know.

The Attention Economy, Widget Universality, Digg vs. Wired, Google Maps Traffic & Help Locating Starbucks

Photo of the Week: It was a rather crazy peculiar week so I went searching for answers in photographs and found this photo titled very strange moon tonight by Ordinary Guy. It captures the lunar eclipse that occurred on March 3, 2007.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.04.07

The Attention Economy: An Overview
Read/Write Web offers a wonderful overview of the Attention Economy. I think the most notable sentence is the following:

"Because of this information explosion, we no longer read - we skim."

The rapid explosion in content has caused a scarcity in attention. Do you read or skim?

Universality of the web widget
Niall Kennedy gets down to the nitty-gitty of explaining some of the differences between widget deployment endpoints from the publisher's point of view, explaining just a few ways a widget must adjust its dialect and structure to adapt and optimize in different widget environments.

Digg Should Sue Wired
Mike Arrington thinks Digg has grounds to sue Wired and explains why in this article. He points to the fact that Wired Magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, owns Digg competitor Reddit and how they are actively engaged in using Wired to undermine Digg.

Quintura Relaunches With New Interface
Quintura, a Moscow-based company I have highlighted previously has relaunched with a new interface.

Adobe Photoshop Online: It’s Real
Adobe will move Photoshop online as part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market.

TouchGraph - Discover the Relationships Contained in Popular Information Sources
Orli Yakuel showcases an interesting search tool that produces a cluster map based off the links to a particular URL. Just remember to get the Java 1.5 toolkit before attempting to run it on your machine. The TouchGraph for Somewhat Frank can be found here.

Google Maps Tailgates Yahoo, Microsoft With Real-Time Traffic Info
Google Maps has caught up with Yahoo and Microsoft in adding live traffic reporting for the United States to their online mapping service.

Data Shows English Blogosphere Has Peaked
Has the English blogosphere peaked in its growth? A new University of Maryland County report seems to think so. What do you think?

Blog Archive SMS-based Starbucks locator, a double shot
Coffee drinkers can now rejoice in the fact you can now send a text message to find out the closest Starbucks. I prefer Dunkin Donuts but either way, I think it is pretty sweet.

Flickr Turns 3
That's right, Flickr, the online photo sharing community owned by Yahoo, has turned three years old and had a big bash to celebrate. Photos can be found here.

Somewhat FeedBurner
Apparently, I have started to receive snail mail at the FeedBurner HQ in Chicago. I guess people think I work for FeedBurner instead of AOL. Either way, I cannot argue with the idea of dual incomes. :)

Web 2.0 Online Identity Video

If you perform a search via a search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL you can quickly check what the web has to offer about you. Our online identity is something that is established with time through our interactions online. I recently wrote an article showcasing the Web Profile Aggregators that help users to aggregate and take back their online identities by letting you play a part in how you are portrayed online. With online identity you can be anyone and you can have multiple identities depending on what you are doing online. The video titled online identity recently by staticfuror on YouTube or Captain Ryan on MySpace (see there are two identities right there for the same person, Ryan McGrady) offers some perspective on what having an online identity means in web 2.0. You can view it via SplashCast video player below.

18Seconds.org Spotlights Energy Savings

18Seconds.org is campaign Yahoo recently launched in conjunction with Lawrence Bender, Oscar-winning producer of the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth,"  devoted to informing the world about the energy savings associated with switching from a normal light bulb to a compact fluorescent lamp. The campaign is based on the idea that is only takes 18 seconds to change a regular light bulb to an energy saving compact fluorescent light bulb. Lawrence Bender authored a guest post on the Yahoo! corporate blog which stated:

"If every American swapped just one bulb, it would save more than $8 billion in energy costs, prevent the burning of 30 billion pounds of coal, and keep the equivalent of two million cars worth of greenhouse gas emissions from entering the atmosphere."

Those are some pretty eye opening numbers. At the same time it is inspiring to hear that everyone can pitch in to help save energy and ultimately the planet. The 18Seconds.org web site offers a mashup which places the current compact florescent lamp purchase numbers by geographic location on a Yahoo map. Currently, Arkansas is the leading energy saving state and Bellingham, Washington is the leading energy saving city in the United States. For additional information about 18Seconds.org, check out the video below.