Photo of the Week: I got a chance to catch up with some old friends this week in Silicon Valley including a trip to Atherton when I snapped this photo.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Tuesday, August 14, 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.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
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!
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Facebook Opens Up, Google Buys FeedBurner, CBS Buys WallStrip, The Blog Search Engine King & What is Web 3.0?
Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by James Yu at Pier 38 in San Francisco on Thursday night (May 24, 2007) as part of the NewTeeVee and MetaCafe Pier Screenings.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.27.07
Facebook Moving to An Open Platform Strategy
Facebook has announced a new strategy to let other companies provide
their services on special pages within its site, moving beyond its
basic social networking service. Facebook is taking the total opposite
approach than its competitor MySpace by making itself an open platform. Will this give personalized homepages a run for the money?
Bebo, Wall Strip, Feedburner - who is getting bought out?
Early in the week Om Malik was wondering which of the three rumored
deals - CBS-WallStrip, Bebo-Yahoo or Google-FeedBurner - will come
true? By weeks end two out of the three (CBS-WallStrip &
Google-FeedBurner) are said to be done deals.
What is Web 3.0?
Dave Winer weighs in on what he believes is web 3.0.
Google Reader vs. NewsGator Online vs. Bloglines
Judi Sohn takes a look at the most popular applications for keeping up with all those RSS feeds in a browser window: Bloglines, NewsGator Online and Google Reader.
RSS in Firefox: A Complete Guide
If reading RSS feeds in Firefox is your thing, check out some of your options in this article.
The Rise of the Nontrepreneur
A new breed of visionaries who are not In It for the money. They want to change the world. This line of thinking reminds me of a little tech mixer event I started with Eric Olson called TECH cocktail - I guess you could say we are nontrepreneurs.
TV Guide Online Video Search
TV Guide now offers an online video guide that distinguishes itself from other online video search by focusing on professionally produced video content such as, movie trailers, TV shows, news clips, previews and programs across all genres and networks.
Every good domain is taken. Here's why.
Have you tried to lock a domain recently? It is not as easy as it might seem. Kevin Ham built a $300 million web company in Vancouver you've probably never heard of collecting domains and selling them for top dollar.
Blog Search is Dead and Google Killed It
A few years ago blog search was an important aspect to every bloggers routine and I always wondered where blog search would go and when Google would come in and become king. Steve Rubel thinks that day has come.
Pageflakes Announces 100,000 Pagecasts
Personalized start page service Pageflakes announced that their "Pagecasts" feature, which allows users to share their Pageflakes pages with the public or a specific group of users, has been used to push out 100,000 Pagecasts.
Google Coop Embeds Gadgets in Search Results
Google Coop has quietly expanded and now can embed data from gadgets (i.e. widgets) as subscribed links.
Movie Review & Start-up Commentary: e-dreams
Eric Olson highlights some movies that document the startup life.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Photobucket Sale, Facebook Classifieds, The Great Digg Revolt, iGoogle Communities & Last.fm Video Launched
Photo of the Week: While in Santa Monica, California this week for Twiistup I decided to get up early on Wednesday to go down to the beach and snap this shot.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits 05.13.07
Facebook to Launch Classifieds Service
Social network Facebook is set to launch a classified service to its users on Friday, according to the New York Times. The service will launch under the name 'Facebook Marketplace.' Makes sense, they are fishing where the fish are.
Are Search Engine Rankings are Dead?
With the advent of personalization and impending changes with the interface of search results, the notion of ranking seems to be on it’s way out. Lee Odden takes a closer look.
You're a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well
In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves -- or their offspring -- to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking searches.
iGoogle Community Modules
Want to put a little piece of yourself on your friends' and family's homepages? The iGoogle team seems to launch little updates every other week but this one caught my eye. it’s a new category called “my community." With cookie-cutter templates you can create your own modules. Creating and sharing these Google Gadgets is as easy as filling out a simple form.
Last.fm Launches Video - Aims To Be The MTV Of Web 2.0 Age
Online radio station Last.fm is adding a video section to its site this week, enabling users to create their own personalized video channels - similar to how users can already create radio stations based on their music tastes.
RSS Feeds for Tags at Amazon.com
The new functionality has been soft-launched and isn’t currently available on all Amazon pages. Support will become available across the board in the coming weeks. Woohoo!
MySpace/Photobucket: User Overlap Is Nearly 100%
NewsCorp plans to pay half as much for Photobucket as they did for MySpace. Photobucket is going for $300 million, and MySpace was acquired for $580 million, back in 2005. Interesting analysis by Mr. Arrington.
What Happened at Digg?
The firestorm that erupted at Digg earlier this week over a censored post has led to a lot of discussion about the nature of censorship in a world where everyone is a publisher. Some are calling it the "The Great Digg Revolt," as it illustrates just how much power the web 2.0 movement has given to its users.
Gmail Users are Younger & Richer?
The
latest stats show that Gmail users skew younger and richer than other
mail products. I guess I am old and poor cause I don't use Gmail.
Five Twitter Tools We Love
Getting sick of Twitter? Maybe these five add-ons may help convince you to the service for a bit longer.
LinkedIn lets you see who is viewing your profile — sort of
LinkedIn has created a
new feature that lets you see who is viewing your profile. So now you
can find out who is stalking looking for you in the business world.
What is your favorite web tech conference in 2007 so far?
Don't forget to vote for a conference you enjoyed the most so far this year!
Saturday, March 10, 2007
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.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
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.
Friday, January 05, 2007
Leafletter For Customized Photo Widgets
Leafletter recently launched a simple application which enables users to create animated widgets that can be embedded into blogs, social networks and
other web sites. These widgets are called "Leaflets" and can be used to display photos and other information in a unique and interesting fashion. Leaflets are Flash based and can be displayed where HTML is welcome.
I recently created a simple Leaflet shown below. I uploaded few photos, selected background colors, layouts, actions and text. Photos can be uploaded from your computer, a URL or via Flickr. I would like to see other photo services as options. Audio and video configuration would also add additional utility. The only frustration I encountered with Leaftree was that the widget sometimes transitioned slowly and caused me to lose pages that I was working on.
Leafletter could come in handy in upcoming blog posts as a new way to present logos or images in a more interesting fashion. With a few additional features added Leafletter could also be used for online mini slide presentations. Check out the Leafletter tutorial for more details on how to set up your own.
Bottom-line: Leafletter enables users to create customizable photo widgets that might come in handy in your next blog post or your social network page.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Widgets and Web 2.0
Widgets have become a hot topic in the web community lately as a large number of sites are allowing users to personalize their experience. The term widget can be used interchangeably with gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake but for the sake of simplicity I will use the term widget in this article to cover all of these terms.
What is a widget?
As the web has become widget happy with community development projects
popping up everywhere, I think it is safe to assume that the general
public does not even know what a widget is. Rachel Cunliffe, cre8d web designer, recently asked this very question as she encountered an advertisement which pointed her to a widget. A widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any
separate html-based web page. A widget can be created for just about every site or service possible thus allowing users to pull it into personalized homepages (Netvibes, Spotback and Pageflakes), blogs (WordPress and Typepad) or other social website pages (AIM Pages, TagWorld and MySpace).
Why all the buzz about widgets?
Widgets are a great way for a site or service to creatively offer products, services or news without having to visit the actual site. Similar to feeds and syndication, widgets can save a user time by making everything they care about on the web easily accessible in one place. Widgets can also leverage syndication in unique ways. The idea really rings clear on a personalized homepage which allow users to aggregate and create their own configuration of widgets. In a recent TechCrunch article Mike Arrington explained the value in a widget-driven personal homepage, Netvibes, as it positions all your favorites in front of you in at one time in saying:
“Like Google search, the best thing about Netvibes is that it has no problem with me quickly leaving the site to take care of other business. And that’s why it’s earned my loyalty as a user.”
Ease of use and the ability to see all or items in one page (via widgets) makes them a key component in the personalization process.
It is unclear exactly who was the first to create a widget. History seems to believe the word "widget" is derived from the combination of "window" and "gadget." 
A number of widget projects have risen up to help further along the widget movement. Konfabulator was swept up by Yahoo and leveraged to launch Yahoo Widgets to place widgets in front of a mainstream audience. Dashboard, an Apple project, was created to place widgets on the Mac OS X desktop. Opera web browser offers desktop widgets. Google Gadgets launched yesterday (October 3, 2006) to unleash 1200 new widgets which can be used on any web page. Microsoft also offers Gadgets for Windows Live. IAmAlpha.com is an AOL widget initative for AIM Pages which launched with a makeover in May 2006.
A number of widget marketplaces that have also popped up. Widgetbox, a the online widget marketplace, looks to widgetize the web by offering a number of different widget options. Widgipedia, a free widget community deems itself the ultimate cross-platform resource for both users and developers of widgets and gadgets. The Spring Box, offers a platform to create widgets on for both the desktop and the web and Clearspring, currently in private beta, also appears to be a widget platform looking to widgetize the web.
Bottom-line: Widgets are the wave of the future of the web as our attention continues to be overloaded with too much information. With widgets, users are able to customize a page to be able to get their sites and services in personalized homepages. An open standard development infrastructure which would allow a single widget to be plugged into any application and work properly seems to be something the widget movement is currently lacking – it may be a pipe-dream but I think it is worth wishing for.
Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail's Guide To Building, Growing & Celebrating Startup Success by Frank Gruber
