Social or community powered search has been attempted a number of different ways but Delver, an Israel based startup, looks to leverage users' social graph to create relevant social search results. I got a preview of Delver at DEMO08 and again at the 2008 IsraelWeb Tour. Delver recently launched its open alpha product for all the World to use. Delver offers web, media and people search function. My first impression: Interesting.
Continue reading "Delver Social Profile Powered Search Engine" »
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.
Finding people on the Web can sometimes be difficult. Many people turn to Google to search for people but unless someone is very active online it can be tough to find people. In addition, there are so many social networks that do not index well on Google. Wink, a Los Altos, California based startup, tries to make it easy to find people online.
Putting a name with a face can sometimes be a rather taunting task in public. However, online Polar Rose is looking to help solve this problem by leveraging facial recognition technology and the power of people online.
Though an early Twitter adopter, I found that when Facebook came out
with its open application platform which included mobile and web status
updates I stopped updating my twitter page as frequently. I just
couldn't keep up with updating two places with my status updates. When you also factor in Flickr photo uploads, myAOL 'Mix & Share' Favorites and regular blog posts (on Somewhat Frank, TECH cocktail and myAOL Blog) I had to start to looking for a way to cut corners. I recently found twitterfeed.com, thanks to my good friend Eric Olson. Twitterfeed.com turns twitter into a status feed aggregator as you can pull all your status updates together to be published on twitter.
Continue reading "Use twitterfeed.com To Aggregate Your Facebook Status Updates On Twitter" »
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.
Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail's Guide To Building, Growing & Celebrating Startup Success by Frank Gruber
