SOMEWHAT FRANK

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!

Gleamd People Bio Postings With Ratings

Gleamd, a product created by pixelspread and design student Matthew McInerney, recently launched into private beta to offer a place to highlight, search and rate people. According to the site:

"Gleamd is a place to highlight interesting people doing interesting things on the Internet."

A quick glimpse of Gleamed might remind you of a blog as its layout offers up posts of people's biographies. Each post can be added by any member of the community and then goes through a moderation process prior to public posting. Some have called it combination of Spock, Mahalo and Digg. Check out the Gleamd screen-shot below.

I think Gleamd has some potential as finding people on the Web is a valuable proposition but it may be missing  a couple of things. First, I feel like Gleamd seems to be missing the ability to update a biography or I could have just missed the feature. UPDATE: I determined that added items or people can be edited by the submitter. Also you cannot add yourself to the product. Secondly, I did not find Gleamd to be doing anything to help build up the number of people added to the product which is important since the people search should get better as more people are added. Gleamd is also against users adding their own biography entry to the site which could limit the number of people added to the site. Either way, Gleamd will be interesting to watch as it is currently only in private beta and has a little time before it's time to shine.

For more information check out the Gleamd blog which pointed me to this interview of Gleamd founder Matthew McInerney.

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.

TECH cocktail Celebrates One

Last night I was in Chicago with Eric Olson co-hosting TECH cocktail Chicago 5 for an estimated six hundred guests at John Barleycorn near Wrigley Field. Eric and I co-founded TECH cocktail just a year ago looking to help foster a tighter and more amplified technology signal and community in Chicago. We have since looked to other underserved tech scenes to do the same. We are planning on having a second TECH cocktail in DC soon and then our first TECH cocktail in Boston.

TECH cocktail Chicago 5 was filled with green energy as guests were amped to celebrate the one year anniversary of TECH cocktail. In addition, guests who wore green clothing were given a chance to win some spectacular prizes from SingleHop, a sponsor that has been backing TECH cocktail since day one.

The three plus hour free event was sponsored by SingleHop, LinkedIn, Digital Bootcamp, Saper Law Office, Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, MK Capital, Origin Ventures, Chicago Micro, Fave Media and LiquidTalk.

Demos were performed by myAOL (a product I manage at AOL),  PollEverywhere, My Open Bar, Braintree Financial, Humanized and Fave Media. More to come on some of these soon as I take a closer look.

We are pleased with the aggressive progress in Chicago and look forward to future events in the Windy City. Thank you to all of our sponsors and supporters, we could not have done it without you. Cheers!

Check out the TECH cocktail Chicago 5 photos displayed in the slideshow below.

Mojits iPhone Web Widget Launcher

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 Chat, iPhone Digg, iPhone Twitter, TaDa List and many more.

Simply create a Mojits account, configure your Mojits to your liking and then navigate to the Mojits Launcher on your iPhone with Safari. My Mojits is shown below.

myAOL Personalization Suite Launches

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 previewed myAOL a few weeks ago and now you can try it out for yourself. myAOL includes the following:

myAOL myPage is an Ajax, personalized homepage which offers applications and content to be your dashboard for the Web. It offers AOL content and applications (i.e. Truveo Video Search, AOL Mail, AOL Video, AOL Music, TMZ.com, etc.) in addition to 3rd party applications (i.e. eBay, Netflix, YouTube and many more coming soon). It offers a push down express widget tray, separate widget gallery, and drag and drop functionality to help make organizing your page a breeze. It also offers pre-configured, Ready-made pages which makes adding pages full of content easier (e.g. news, celebrity, technology). With partnerships with Google and Goowy Media, myAOL will offer an assortment of Google Gadgets and Goowy yourminis among other 3rd party widgets.

myAOL Mgnet (pronounced “Magnet”) is an innovative and fun, visual content discovery and recommendations engine. Mgnet offers a visual approach (using image clouds) to finding new content that you might be interested in on the Web.  By using both collaborative filtering and active inputs to provide Web recommendations to users Mgnet pulls in images and content (videos, articles, blogposts, podcasts, etc.) based on the user's likes and dislikes – users able to rate and save individual stories/feeds.  Mgnet leverages Truveo and Sphere for robust offering of Web content Mgnet also displays “What’s hot” which taps into the hot items in the myAOL suite. Some additional social aspects will be integrated soon to make it easy to share your recommendations with your buddies.

myAOL Favorites is a combination feed reader & bookmarking product with a built in feed mashup creator (making easy to create your own feed mashups!). Favorite's feed  reader offers a robust and easy to use feed reader for fast content updates from your favorite sites with shortcut keys and previous/next buttons make it easier to get through a lot of content quickly. Folders are setup for easy organization Integrated bookmarking and sharing features Import/Export feeds from other readers synched feeds via mobile. Bookmarks are integrated with the feed reader experience making saving your favorite items a one-click process while reading your favorite feeds. Finally, one of my favorite features of the suite is "Mix & Share" within Favorites which allows you easily create a mashup feed which also renders as a page. You simply just added your favorite feeds or bookmarks to a folder then click the green "Mix & Share" button to see you options which include creating a public feed and page which can then can be leveraged in a widget, shared via email, AIM or AIM Share. This really makes creating mashup feeds easy and understandable to someone that may not understand everything about XML, RSS or feeds.

The entire myAOL team (dev, design, product, ops, qa, etc) has worked hard developing this personalization product suite, with some  help from other groups at AOL and partners - thank you to all for the hard work and dedication. We hope you like the new myAOL and if you have any suggestions or feedback on something that you would like to see us add or change please let me know. Be sure to check out the myAOL Blog to stay updated on the latest happenings in the myAOL personalization suite.

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.

Facebook Growth, Content Worth 4.3B, Twitter vs. Pownce, Podcasting Tools, Sphere Success & CrunchBase

Photo of the Week: American Flag on Parade at Dewey Beach for the 'Running of the Bulls' taken by Matt Hirschmann.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.08.07

Facebook Sees Flood of New Traffic from Teenagers and Adults
In the months prior to allowing open registration, Facebook.com’s traffic hovered at approximately 14 million visitors per month. However, after Facebook opened its doors to the general public, visitation accelerated to reach a level of 26.6 million visitors.

Your Content is About to Be Worth $4.3B
MediaWeek reports that advertising on social networks, blogs and other venues where consumers produce content is about to become a much bigger business than it is now. It's on pace to be a billion-dollar business this year. However, by 2011 it will grow to $4.3B.

Twitter v Pownce: It’s The API, Stupid
Nik Cubrilovic compares Twitter to Pownce and believes that there are two key things that Twitter has done well that Pownce has overlooked completely.

CrunchBase
TechCrunch quietly rolls out a web 2.0 directory of companies and services.

MyBlogLog: DNS for People
Ian Kennedy explains MyBlogLog's strategy. They want to build a platform which allows you to get to know someone through what they produce and share, collectively, across all networks and the internet.

Podcasting Toolbox: 70+ Podcasting Tools and Resources
A great list of podcasting resources aggregated by Mashable.

'Hyper-Local' Site Backfence Shutting Down
Backfence emerged about the same time, a couple of years ago, as InsiderPages, Judy's Book and Yelp. Now it appears to be closing its doors.

Classified Info: Craigslist Alternatives Compared
The online classified sites compared.

Sphere Quietly Nailing Its Business Model
Instead of focusing on building a better blog search engine (an area that Google now dominates after a recent Technorati refocus), Sphere has spent its time developing technology that automatically finds blog posts related to whatever a user is looking at

Netvibes, now with one less CEO
GigaOm reports on some changes at Netvibes which includes the departure of Pierre Chappaz. Chappaz is leaving Netvibes and instead will be focusing on Wikio, his personalized blog and news search service that is now said to have two million unique visitors a month.

Video Interview at Supernova

I recently attended Supernova 2007, a conference in San Francisco focused on innovation, and was interviewed by Adriana Gascoigne of Bub.blicio.us, Future Works and founder of Girls in Tech. The video interview (below) is found at the 3 minute 30 second mark on this 9:03 minute video clip. In the video interview I discuss blogging on Somewhat Frank and the development of the new myAOL.

FixYa A Free Gadget & Consumer Electronic Product Support Community

Do you have questions about your latest gadget purchase? If so you can always take a look the instruction manual that came with that particular product. However, you still might have questions which is where FixYa comes in. FixYa offers free tech support and technical help for gadgets, electronic equipment and consumer products. 

FixYa aggregates support information from its community of users who share their experiences of technical problems and solutions. FixYa offers a rating system for support content which allows its users to find the best solution for every problem and even solve new problems. FixYa's knowledgebase is based on real users' experience rather than on information by the manufacturer.

FixYa could come in handy for iPhone related questions. For example, find out  the best way to send an SMS message to multiple recipients via the iPhone. Or better yet, I'd love to figure out how to get my enterprise email flowing into my iPhone.

Interestingly, community members can also earn money for answering other users technical questions. If a user solves a premium problem they can get up to $5.00 for the solution. Additionally, users can provide live chat assistance and receive up to $15.00 for a solution.

Bottom-line: FixYa provides free community supported tech support and technical help for gadgets and consumer electronic equipment and products. 

Company Could Win $50K At TechCrunch20

TechCrunch20, the TechCrunch conference coming up in September, is offering a platform for newly launching companies to present for free in front of an audience of hundreds of press, bloggers venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and potentially win a $50,000 prize. TechCrunch has been assembling an impressive and assorted list of judges which are listed here. Should be a good conference as the winning company/product will walk away a big winner! In addition, there will be other prize announcements and giveaways from conference sponsors. 

Stay tuned to additional updates on the TechCrunch20 blog.

Email Woes Getting You Down? Perhaps the Post Office Can Help

Email used to be so hip. Now it is such a pain in the ass. I have written about email management and liberating my email inbox before, but being on the road the last 19 days has turned my inbox upside down. Om Malik wrote a great piece today about email bankruptcy which starts by saying:

"Email sucks."

I agree. I have thousands of messages and I cannot get through them all. I am hoping to get to them soon, but even on a U.S. holiday (July 4th) emails continued to flow in like a river of hell. These days I am finding myself looking for more interesting ways to communicate, whether it be via the notes or comments on Flickr photos, Facebook status, wall or other messages, SMS or Twitter.

All this pondering reminded me of the good old days when getting mail from the post office, that’s right, “snail mail" was the way to communicate. So I did a little poking around and found that there are a couple of products offering users the ability to easily send “snail mail” from the Web.  If you think your email inbox is cluttered, now your kitchen counter and office desk can be cluttered too!

Postful offers users the ability to have any email sent via the post office for the charge of $0.99 for the first page and $0.25 for each additional page. Postful's mission is to be the bridge between the digital and physical worlds – thus making easy to send emails as letters to grandparents and other non-email users.

Easy Post, a Canada startup, offers users the ability have mail sent directly from the Web to Canada addresses. Easy Post is free anywhere in Canada.

eSnailer offers users the ability to send any letter over “snail mail” via the Web. eSnailer is free because it is supported by ads and free offers that are shown after you write your letter. Users must accept a free offer in return for the service.

If you want to go the other way and turn all your "snail mail" into email you should check out Remote Control Mail which was highlighted previously on TechCrunch.

Bottom-line: Information overload is a problem regardless of the medium, we can take ongoing measures to defense the problem.

FeedBurner Goes Free With Pro Services

FeedBurner, the Chicago-based feed management startup that was recently acquired by Google, has decided to offer its Pro services for free. Users can now get all the Pro stats and services for free. FeedBurner's official announcement was posted earlier this morning calling itself "FreeBurner."

I assume the shift to free Pro services was made because Google doesn't really need the $5 per year that FeedBurner was charging for Pro services. In addition, Google probably is better suited to handle beefing up the servers and bandwidth if they get an influx of Pro users. Whatever the reason, thank you FeedBurner & Google - be sure to activate these new features as soon as you can to make sure you are maximizing your FeedBurner benefits.

Lending Club: Person-to-Person Lending

Do you want to borrow money for less? Join the club, the Lending Club, that is. Lending Club is an online lending community where people borrow and lend money among each other. By working together Lending Club, members can borrow money at a better rate than they would get from a bank.

Founded by Renaud Laplanche in the summer of 2006 Lending Club launched on Facebook on May 24, 2007 with the goal off make person-to-person lending mainstream. Lending Club has offered over $100,000 in loans via Facebook. Lending Club charges an origination fee of 0.75% to 2% to the borrowers and a servicing fee of 1% to the lenders.

In talking with Kurt Collins, formerly of Photobucket, in San Francisco last week and he explained how he was excited to join Lending Club as the Director of Business Development. Rex Dixon, a blogosphere friend, is also part of the Lending Club team.

Bottom-line: Lending Club is an online lending community that enable users to better rates via person-to-person loans.