SOMEWHAT FRANK

Fonts Dance In Adobe Flash Video

Have you ever seen fonts dance like this? To the sound of Obadiah Parker's covering Outkast's "Hey Ya!", Brian Shaler leveraged Adobe Flash typography animation technology to create this video that make fonts dance.

BuzzFeed: What's Buzzing On The Web

What's buzzing on the web? Wouldn't it be nice to know? Using a combination of techniques which include sophisticated algorithms, click tracking and human editors BuzzFeed, a NY-based startup, discovers and distributes what is buzzing on the Web.

BuzzFeed's simple, elegant blog-like design was influenced by Jason Kottke. The light, clean background and orange accents makes the page pop like shiny candy for your eyes.  Images and large text display categorized buzz from the Web.

Anymails: Visualize Your Email Inbox

I have written several times about my love/hate relationship with email. So I am definitely on the lookout for email management applications and I just came across something interesting. Anymails, a project created by Carolin Horn as part of her thesis, allows you to visualize your received emails as microbes. The objective of this Flash-based project is to offer the user another type of email experience. Unfortunately, it only currently works on a Mac.

Uncover Hot Local Venues & People

Uncover offers a community-powered site for local venues and people. Recently released into public beta by three twenty-somethings, Spencer Fry, Jason Nelson and Dave Gorum, aim to deliver a social network for people looking to go out and meet people at night.

Similar to Digg or other community powered sites Uncover has it's own currency called the "Uncover" which is awarded for a venue rating or review on the site. Users with the most "Uncovers" are given promotion in the community. For example, here are the top people in the Bay Area.

Currently in 20 cities, Spencer Fry he had this to say of Uncover's approach and future direction: 

"We're trying to combine keeping friends in touch with providing ideas about where to go out for the evening, and with whom. We want Uncover to be the website you just have to visit before going out for the night, and we're organizing our future features around that concept."

While there are other sites that offer up local venue information, Uncover's rich and clean design is different by leading with photos rather than text-based reviews. Additionally, users are can contribute reviews, tags and photos. I expect Uncover to add more social hooks soon which would help to contribute to Uncover's social stickiness.

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.

Sudokular For Online Sudoku Puzzles

For the past two years my brother-in-law has been completing sudoku puzzles, something he finds challenging and entertaining, but something I know little about, until now that is. A German based start-up,  Sudokular, offers online sudoku and leverages syndication to send daily sudoku puzzles.

Sudoku is a game of logic that requires brains and concentration, and according to several anti-aging sites, wards off degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s.  I’m all for warding off any kind of disease, so I was raring to get started. Sudoku has only one rule, fill in the game board so numbers 1 through 9 occur in any order only once in each row, column or box of three by three squares. This seemed simple enough, I thought.

Games are available at various difficulty levels, from easy, to standard and then hard. A game mode of either simple mode or expert mode can be selected and the game begins.
Never having attempted a sudoku puzzle, I signed up for the easy and simple mode. I also activated the in-game help, which allowed my input to be checked while the game was running.  After playing the game for 17 minutes, (a clock begins ticking as the first number is placed on the board) the board was filled, and a quick look revealed my score, based on the total number of correctly placed numerals.  I did remarkably well for a beginner.

Sudokular is successful at captivating one’s attention and can be played in place of the standard Solitare game so many use to pass time. I definitely have a new respect for all those sudoku players I’ve observed at Starbuck’s. Bravo!

30elm Home Design Community Launches

30elm recently launched to create a hub to help connect home owners with interior decorators, home building and renovation professionals. 30elm was started by Matt Myers and Chris Conley from Matt's apartment in Brooklyn.

30elm offers a couple of different functions as it caters to both home owner and design professionals. Home owners can follow along as others in the community renovate their homes by reading the latest blog entries and case studies. Case studies can range from a number of home design topics. I found this interesting case study that highlights a barn that was converted into a lovely home.

If you are starting a home improvement project you can upload your photos and get advice along the way from other home design enthusiasts and professionals. Home owners that already have their own blog you can use 30elm to syndicate it through the community. It is free for home owners to use 30elm.

Design professionals can leverage 30elm to contribute blog entries, case studies and work with home owners to help then with their design needs. Priced from free to $499 a month based on the number of leads generated, design professionals can use 30elm as a lead generation platform. Additional pricing details can be found here.

Bottom-line: 30elm is a home design community for both designers and home owners alike.

Give FeedBack With Review Basics

Do you ever need to gather feedback on a photo, document, web site or video? While email and wikis and products like Basecamp and Adobe Acrobat might meet some of your needs, ReviewsBasics as it aims to help by offering a feedback gathering platform which allows users to exchange ideas, gather thoughts, and review various types of content.

This free, feature-rich, product offers a number of annotation options on web sites, images, documents or videos. If these options do not suit your needs then you can also get some custom work done as ReviewBasics offers customized solutions that fit your specific needs. Review Basics are organized by authors who can set up reviews and send them to reviewers to give feedback. A screen-shot of the application while performing a web site review of a familiar blog is shown below.

 

Rootly Relaunches: Design Much Improved

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 on about one thousand preselected sources plus sources added by users. As a number of users add the same source it gains trusted status and eventually enters the general index. Rootly offers some decent search result feeds as well as internal bookmarking. Additionally, Rootly has added the ability to accept OpenID. The site reminds me of the old version of Topix (minus images) before its recent relaunch.

According to Marshall, Rootly looks to continue to roll out new features which include OPML import - which has a whole lot of implications - and a customizable widget for personal startpages. One thing I would like to see though as they continue to improve is the addition of thumbnail images to each result.

Interestingly, Rootly sent me review request via ReviewMe several months ago and I had to decline. Back then, I just did not find it compelling enough to write about. The UI was terrible and it has some usability issues. I am happy to see Rootly has come a long way and offers a much improved its product.  It is just proof that if you create a compelling product experience  and people will talk about it.

 

Sputtr: Simply Search From One Place

Tired of having to go open a number of browser windows to perform a search across a number of search engines? Sputtr wants to make it easier by putting search engine results to your favorite search engines in one page and just one click away from results. As it's name implies, you don't need to sputter to perform several searches from various sites. I know what you are thinking, it sounds like a trivial mashup but I thought Sputtr's simple approach and clean, aesthetically pleasing design were worth showcasing.

With Sputtr, you simply put in a search term then click an icon from the search options below the search box to be taken to results. Like I said, it is a clean and simple approach but so is Google and look where they are now. 

Are you ready to Twiistup?

If you are going to be in the Los Angeles, California area on May 9, 2007 then I would recommend you make your way to Zanzibar in Santa Monica to Twiistup. What is Twiistup? Twiistup, founded by Mike Macadaan, a friend and AOL colleague, is an event that aims to bring together the brightest minds in SoCal for an evening of conversations, demos and enjoyment.

There will be demonstrations from:

Buildv1
Verse Studios
goodreads
yourminis
Urbaniacs
mint
ooVoo

I am planning on being in attendance (unless my work schedule interferes) and it’s my birthday so I am going to take 50 Cent’s advice:

It's your birthday
We gon' party like it's your birthday
We gon' sip Bacardi like it's your birthday
And you know we don't give a f*ck
cause it's not your birthday!

I hope to see you there. I wrote about Twiistup on the TECH cocktail site and Mike offered up the promo code: techcocktail to save guests $10 per ticket - snag your tickets today.

FreshBooks For Web Invoices & More

What are some good invoicing applications to use? A friend of mine recently asked me this very question and I surprisingly drew a blank. So I made it my mission to seek out an anwser. FreshBooks, a Toronto-based startup, offers an online invoicing and time tracking application that nicely fits the bill. 

I do not consider invoicing systems the least bit moving but I was pleasantly surprised with FreshBooks as it offers some design elements that resemble a 37signals product. With FreshBooks a company can customize the layout of the application and all of the invoices and reports. I have included a screen-shot to the left of sample invoice I created (click it to enlarge). Interestingly, FreshBooks recently integrated with the 37signals project management product Basecamp to offer a super small business mashup and API.

Aside from its design elements, Basecamp integration and invoice customizations, FreshBooks' billing options caught my attention as you can send bills via email or by ground mail with return envelopes directly from FreshBooks. FreshBooks also offers storage for documents and the ability to create reports. 

Bottom-line: FreshBooks offers a free online application for managing your small business invoices and time-sheets.

Topix Lets The Community Edit the News

Topix, a local news aggregator, has launched a substantial redesign and domain change (from Topix.net to Topix.com). The new design also offers an updated citizen journalistic direction which empowers users to be the editors of the news site. This is the second redesign in the last two years for Topix.
In first visiting the new Topix, users will immediately encounter three options to select from, which include read (news), talk (in forums) and edit (the news). Selecting the read option sends users directly to the news, but the news layout has been tweaked to resemble a blog layout (see screenshots below) which many users have become comfortable with. Users can comment on every story just like a blog. The talk option takes users to the Topix forums which have been increasingly popular since their launch as they generate about 40,000 posts a day on the average. The edit option is a new option which allows users to sign up to be an editor of the site. Once an approved editor in a specific area or topic, a user can create and edit the news site. Vented editors can add content in five different ways which include promoting stories by URL, from the newswire, forums, creating stories from scratch or by emailing tips and photos from your mobile device (just text <zipcode>@topix.net). Taking a page out of the Wikipedia playbook the new Topix tries to keep its editors honest by displaying their editor history.
In talking with Blake Williams from Topix, he expressed that:

"We (Topix) are adding humanity to the site by giving users powerful tools to create and manage the news." 

I would have to agree as the new Topix.net uses a blog-like platform which has proven to be a powerful tool over the course of the last few years as blogs have risen to near the level of mainstream media in reach and exposure. Overall, I was impressed by the bold move by Topix, a total citizen powered site. It will be fascinating to see if mainstream users gravitate towards the opportunity to sculpt the news pages of their local area.

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.

Yourminis Flashy Personalized Homepage

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 web.

Yourminis, nominated for the 'Best New Site' award at the upcoming SXSW Interactive conference, recently made some changes to focus more on the social aspects of the web by reconfiguring the URL for the personalized homepage from Yourminis.com to Yourminis.com/start. The former URL has been replaced with an html-based “community landing page” which highlights Yourminis’ personalized homepage, desktop widgets, featured pages, widgets and users. The “community landing page” enables users to interact with the widgets as well as with other Yourminis users, thus emphasizing the social aspects of the product. Users can create tabs and share tabs with the rest of the community and I quickly created a tab made up of few Somewhat Frank related items - it can be seen here. Another user configured tab that I am particularly fond of is the Chicago Cubs tab shown below (Go Cubs!).

Of the comparable personalized homepage startups like Netvibes and Pageflakes among others in the space, Yourminis offers the most whiz-bang experience with a number of slick widgets. However, Yourminis could be criticized for being too overwhelming, with its flair and countless configurations, to a first time user. Yourminis’ recent change to a “community landing page” for a first time experience might help to assist overwhelmed users, however it also puts users a click further away from adopting the personalized homepage.

Aesthetic shimmer aside, performance and accessibility are still important aspects of a personalized homepage. With Yourminis I have encountered a couple of hiccups in respect to both as I have had to re-save changes upon returning to see them reverted, and I also have tried to access Yourminis from a public computer and found it inaccessible due to the absence of a Flash browser plug-in. That aside I still find Yourminis a compelling dashboard experience.

Bottom-line:  Yourminis offers a Flash-based personalized homepage experience that might be your cup of tea if you are looking for a flashy approach.

Related Articles:
The History of the Personal Homepage
Widgets Live! Everywhere
Widgets and Web 2.0