SOMEWHAT FRANK

Daylife A New Way To Explore News

Daylife, a New York-based news aggregator with personalization hooks, launched a few weeks ago to offer users another way to ingest the daily news. It brings a new fresh look to a news site. Daylife is backed by many, including bloggers Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington but they are not in love with the initial cut of the product. Arrington reported his disappointment by saying:

“What makes Daylife stand out is not so much what it does well, but what’s been left out. There are no RSS feeds, even for your bookmarked stuff. Even worse, there’s no ability for users to leave comments on articles, a feature that has been wildly successful at NewsVine and Topix. And the fact that the front page news is gathered by humans, instead of the algorithmically determined news at Digg, means the company will always have a higher cost of doing business.”

The absence of RSS feeds surprised me since Jeff Jarvis a strong supporter of syndication  (i.e. did the keynote at the Syndicate conference in New York last May) was assisting the startup. However, Jeff has "No disagreement" that feeds should have been added by saying:

"Nature of a startup: some things get onto the boat at launch, others hitch the next ride. RSS was one of the last features to get delayed until a later release; it’s coming. I had subscribed to various of the test feeds and got addicted quickly, so I, too, am eager for them to come out."

So it sounds like they are coming soon and I would imagine the average Jane or Joe probably has not even realize RSS is missing. Regardless, Daylife offers some interesting views of the news including the view that Steve Rubel calls his favorite, the magazine cover feature shown below.

Luckily the product is still in beta, since when I searched for "web 2.0" I encountered a cryptic error message. You can see a screen-shot below of a starred “web 2.0” category. In time this category should pull in content related to this to pic. It will be interesting to see Daylife evolve as it has introduced content personalization offerings within the application by allowing users to start content areas of interest. I just wonder if users think Daylife’s offering is compelling enough to add it to their daily online routine. To find out more information take the Daylife tour. Also check out the Daylife blog for future updates.

Riffs: Rant, Rave & Recommend

Have something witty to say about a particular item? Riffs, an ATTAP Technologies company, offers a feature-rich, social bookmarking, recommendation site for information-sharing details about movies, music, fashion and other sorts of interests. With Riffs you can recommend different items by starting a riff, registering and posting a witty comment about a particular item. Alternatively, you can just rant or rave about an existing item by leaving a comment or simply giving an item a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Users can also create and link to webpages associated with specific riffs.

Riffs launched with more than four million items to riff on, including albums, movies, restaurants, events, consumer electronics, games and books. You can add practically anything to Riffs and then you and the rest of the community can riff on it. The most popular riffs are presented on the homepage as well as within its corresponding category. Riffs offers loads of different features, which include RSS feeds for each individual riff and riff profile. Unfortunately, Riffs does not offer category level or popular riff RSS feeds.  Riffs also offers users to tag items as a way to organize items. A screen-shot of the “web 2.0” tag is shown below.

Riffs flexes its social networking muscles by enabling profile creation and the collection of contacts or friends therein. Friends can offer up recommended content to other Riff buddies. Additionally, Riff has implemented a music recommendation engine called iSuggest, which offers up automated music recommendations based on your recorded musical taste. iSuggest is a downloadable application that connects your Apple iTunes library to Riffs. It allows you to get music recommendations right where you listen to music and at the same time helps you keep your Riffs music preferences updated. Qloud and Mog are a couple of other services that sync with iTunes in a similar fashion.

Another interesting feature that caught my attention was the ability to import del.icio.us bookmarks into Riffs so that you and the community can further comment on them. I struggle to see how bookmarks play into the granular item riffs that are already in the system, but I guess Riffs is looking to offer content about just anything; so it makes sense. It is a good way to get people to adopt the system and start to use Riffs as a social bookmarking system.

Check out this online Riff demo about setting up your page. Riff has also provided a demo on how to perform the del.icio.us import.

Bottom-line: Riffs offers a simple repository for information about just about anything you can think of and in true web 2.0 fashion it’s powered by user created riffs or content items, recommendations, comments, rants, raves and other item details.

The One Million Masterpiece: Online Artwork Collaboration For The Records

The One Million Masterpiece or OMM for short is a piece of online collaborative artwork with record book aspirations. Similar to the Million Dollar Homepage which sold one million 1 pixel squares for $1 per pixel, the One Million Masterpiece looks for a small donation  of a minimum of 3.50GBP which is approximately $6.50USD (5.10EUR, 7.20CAD, 8.70AUD or 743.5JPY) to one of the participating charities in return for a square of the collaborative digital canvas. The charities include:

• Oxfam International
• Save the Children
• World Cancer Research Fund
• ActionAid International
• World Wildlife Fund

The One Million Masterpiece is the brain-child of Paul Fisher who has big dreams for the artwork as it aims for the record books. Upon completion the piece should measure approximately 8 meters or 26 feet which is about the height of a two story house.
The site itself is Ajax-based and was created mainly by Eamonn Ramsay designed and developer the entire application. It offers a way to easily navigate through the various art squares. Upon clicking on a square it is enlarged to a full view. The site also has social hooks which include comments and ratings. I just registered and donated to World Wildlife Federation to create the square shown below. 

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Woohoo Brings Sexy To Photo Slideshows

Woohoo, an AOL Pictures by-product, recently upgraded to offer a more robust Flash-based snaggable photo slideshow widget. The previous widget offered the ability to show images in a clickable stack called the photo collage as shown below or by visiting this link.

The upgraded version of woohoo offers not only the photo collage layout but five additional layouts or "woohoos" which could add interesting Flash effects to any photo slideshow. Users can customize the size, color and layout of the various widgets. By publishing the widget users  receive a link to share with friends and family or HTML code which can be embedded into a blog, web site or social network page like MySpace or AIM Pages.

I would urge you to play around with each "woohoo" as all 6 are interesting visual presentation options. If you are not happy with those options woohoo offers developers the ability to customize even more of the widget. I created a custom sized woohoo slideshow with one of my favorite woohoo effect called Ken Burns. The Ken Burns effect refers to a technique of embedding still photographs in motion pictures made popular in Ken's award winning documentaries such as The Civil War and Baseball. The effect is characterized by slow zooming and panning effects, and fading transitions between images. Check it out below or visit it directly.

Bottom-line: Woohoo offers a great way to organize your AOL Picture photo in a sexy slideshow which can be shared via email or by displaying it on your blog, social network page or another web site. Woohoo!

Improve Your Vocabulary With Quizlet

Remember having vocabulary lists in elementary school and your parents drilling you every day for the big end-of-the-week quiz?  And then middle school – as if English wasn’t bad enough - enter vocabulary in another language altogether.

Thankfully, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to brave those terrors.  But soon students will be able to leverage a fantastic new resource: Quizlet.  Created by Andrew Sutherland, a high school student and self-proclaimed boy genius, Quizlet takes the tedium out of vocabulary.

Operating under the premise that a) students need to better retain their knowledge and b) there has to be a better way to study for those tests, Quizlet takes on many roles so that students can get those words memorized for good:

• Instead of your mom, Quizlet keeps track of the words you know and only retests you on the ones you don't.
• Quizlet lets students share their word lists and facilitates interactive studying.
• It’s free (and thus perfect for the demographic).

Quizlet’s functionality is pretty simple: you enter or import words and definitions, and then Quizlet tests you through various mediums including flashcards, specialized tests and collaboration with friends until the list is mastered.  A screen shot of the application is shown below. Additional features include foreign language capabilities and discussion capabilities so students can vent about the merciless teachers that assign vocabulary.

Photo Attribution: density quiz 11/17 taken by Jack Lyons

Mojiti: Add Comments, Captions & Subtitles To Online Videos

The web offers a place for global conversation as anyone can share opinions, thoughts and insight through blogs, online video or comments strings. Annotating the web has been a recent trend as sites like Fleck launched to allow users the ability to add notes to web sites. Wouldn't it be interesting to be able to annotate video on the web in the same way? Mojiti, a privately held US-based company operating out of China, makes it easy for users to add annotations to videos from a number of video sites on the web.

Mojiti works by allowing users to select a video and personalize it with annotations called Spots. There are currently seven different Spot types which include: Text Spots, Subtitle Spots, Speech Bubble Spots, Thought Bubble Spots, Circle Spots, Rectangle Spots, and Image Spots. Certian Spots allow users the ability to add text to the top of the video while others place images into the a video. Users can also create custom Spot Sets which display together in a video. Spots are associated with video time intervals and can be easily navigated through similar to navigating through music tracks in a music player. Once a new video is created Mojiti makes it easy to share by sending a link or embedding it into a web site. Check out embedded video below to see Mojiti in action.

To find out more information about Mojiti check out the Mojiti blog, Mojiti on MySpace or the Mojiti FAQ page.

Bottom-line: Mojiti is an innovative online video product that empowers users to include personalized commentary, opinions and insight in web videos thus further extending the conversations of the web.

Mix-Mas: A Virtual World For Sending Customized Holiday Greetings

With the holidays upon us hopefully you have sent your holiday wishes to all your family and friends. However, if you have not and you are still looking to send a holiday greeting you could send them a dancing elf greeting or you could give something a little more interactive a try. I recently was sent a greeting via Mix-Mas, a product created by Mantis, which brings holiday greeting customization and social interactivity to a new level. Mix-Mas is a flash-based web service that lets you send holiday greeting that all live together in a holiday greeting virtual world.

With Mix-Mas you can create a custom avatar to represent you in your greeting. The avatar will live in the Mix-Mas virtual holiday greeting world. While creating your avatar you can select from a number of options very similar to WeeWorld. A screen-shot of the creation screen can be seen above. After creating your avatar messenger you can send the greeting to anyone. I have created one here. Upon recieving the greeting you are directed to it in the Mix-Mas virtual world as shown below.

You will notice a number of other avatars which carry the messages as well. If you click on any avatar they will display their holiday message adding a web 2.0 social hook to the holiday greeting product. You can see my holiday greeting here or search Mix-mas by avatar name (i.e. Frank Gruber). If you still need more details check out this Mix-Mas video demo or by clicking the video below.

Bottom-line: Mix-Mas is a fun new way to send online holiday greetings. Create a custom avatar and send a holiday greeting today. Happy holidays!

CozmoTV Launches Personalized Video Site With Recommendations

CozmoTV, a subsidiary of Cozmo Media which has offices in San Francisco and Boston, recently launched an online video site that focuses on providing users with personalized video recommendations. Users can create custom channels for different types of content. Users can also rate individual videos to on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. These active inputs appear to be used to sculpt personalized video recommendations. According to the CozmoTV web site the idea spawned from the idea that:

“We both loved our TiVo®Boxes and thought that a great service would be to provide simplified search through a Website that would talk directly to your TiVo. (Sorry, TiVo, but we felt that your online scheduler kind of sucked.)”

I first learned of CozmoTV at the TechCrunch 8 Meetup in NYC when I talked with CozmoTV co-founder Alex Rowland. Since CozmoTV had not yet launched I was not able to see a product demo but he did compare CozmoTV to Pandora and TiVo.  I now see the validity in those comparisons though I also think CozmoTV's active inputs personalization model mirrors that of StumbleUpon Video which also recently launched. CozmoTV pulls its videos from YouTube but in doing comparison searches it appears to be only a subset of YouTube videos but as the number of online videos increases I could see this product becoming helpful in sorting through and finding new videos.

CozmoTV created incentives to go check it out and start rating video by offering up 80 Nintendo Wii gaming systems as prizes to the first 80 users who have a user confidence rating of 80 or more. I took some time to see how difficult that might be and I have to admit it is not a walk in the park. I watched and rated hours worth of video and was only able to get my rating up to 10.1%. At this rate, I may be better off looking for a Wii elsewhere but, that aside, I enjoyed creating my own channels and viewing the personalized recommendations.

For other perspectives on CozmoTV's recent launch check out: Rev2.org and Zatz Not Funny!. Also stay tuned to CozmoTV updates via the CozmoTV blog and good luck trying to win a Wii!

Megite Improves Personal Aggregator

Megite, an online news aggregator created by Matthew Chen, which I have highlight previously has improved its personalized news aggregator, My Megite by allowing users the ability to manage their own feed reading lists via an OPML file. Megite previously allowed users to create their own personalized news aggregator by sending in an OPML feed reading file in to Megite via email which was a very manual process. Though a great idea the previous process did not scale well as it created management bottleneck as users were not allowed to make their own OPML file updates. The new My Megite has eliminated this bottleneck. You can see mine here: Frank Gruber's Megite Personalized News Aggregator.

Dance Like An Elf: Spread Holiday Cheer

Officemax has produced a suite of holiday themed micro-site flash applications with viral marketing in mind.  One of the applications in particular enables you to fulfill your holiday dreams. That's right you can dance like an elf on the Internet with Elf Yourself!

A friend of mine pointed the site out to me yesterday and of course I needed to immediately elf myself. Unfortunately, I don't drop to the snow and show off my break-dance moves but I still bust a move with the best of them.

The Officemax tab in the lower right corner of the site offers a view of the additional micro-site applications which all seem to be focused at spreading the Officemax viral email messaging cheer. Some of them include:

Reindeer Arm Wrestling
Yes I'm Working
North Pole Dancing
Don't Shoot Your Eye Out!

Check them out or just elf yourself and drop some slick dance moves in an elf costume today. Happy holidays!

innerTee T-Shirt Design and Creation Community Publicly Launches

innerTee, an Austin, Texas based startup, came of out private beta this week to publicly launch a social network for custom t-shirt design and creation. Community members can create their own custom t-shirt from a selection of designer contributed artwork. innerTee offers an interesting opportunity for designers that contribute artwork to get paid for the usage of their contributed artwork.

The interface used to create a tee shirt is simple to use and is referred to as "mixing" a tee. Once you have mixed a garment to your liking you can purchase it online. You can also share the design with everyone in the community, embed it into a webpage or send it along via email.

I created a quick design that can be accessed by the rest of the community to buy or re-mix (click the button below to see the design or look at the screen-shot above). Users can leave feedback in the form of comments under each design. Additionally, the site offers forums for designers, artists and t-shirt shoppers to further interact.

innerTee offers a place for t-shirt addicts to go creatively wild taking the idea of community submitted garments, that Chicago-based Threadless has banked on for a few years, to the next level. For more information on innerTee check out the innerTee blog.

Bottom-line: innerTee is an interesting new social site for personalized garment creation that came out of private beta this week. I like the fact that designers can contribute and profit from their work within the community. My only real negative thought about innerTee is that the pricing seems to be a little bit inflated. We will see if it catches on and innerTee cashes in.

Current Feed Reading Habits Examined

The way that people read their content has been evolving as online syndication has spawned a number of different content reading approaches. Firefox introduced live browser bookmarks and IE7 recently added the feature to integrate feed reading into the web browser. A number of online and desktop-based feed readers round have been duking it out. While personal homepages have also grown very popular as users can customize a page with widgets to fit their routine interests and needs.

I recently encountered an article by Stuart Brown that examines a snapshot of current feed reader habits by taking a look at the FeedBurner feed subscription metrics of his site Modern Life Is Rubbish. Stuart gives his opinion on the various reader options that are used by his subscribers. A similar report was done by FeedBurner a few months back as they analyzed TechCrunch's feed subscription metrics. In comparing my own feed subscription method metrics to both of these reports I think it is worth noting that Somewhat Frank offers similar trends in readership (see pie chart below) but also has subscribers using additional other unmentioned services which further amplifies the segmentation in the feed reader marketplace.

Widgets Live! Everywhere

Widgets Live! was a fabulous day of festivities (November 6, 2006) which attracted the thought leaders of the web, mobile and gadget industries to discuss one of the hottest topics, widgets. Companies like AOL, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Adobe all had representatives contributing details on its latest widget endeavors. A number of startups like FeedBurner, Six Apart, Wordpress and Photobucket contributed to the conversation.  While widget startups like Widgetbox, Clearspring and Snipperoo explained the way they are approaching widgets. The event was appropriately kicked off by an insightful keynote address by Arlo Rose, the founder of Konfabulator, a desktop widget suite that has often linked to the recent widget craze.

I decided not to live blog the event as I have done in the past with conferences like Supernova and Syndicate but AOL colleague Stephanie Bergman and Liz Gannes of GigaOm did. While John Panzer was on the Blog Sidebar Widget panel representing AOL and blogged about it here. James Ward explained how Adobe's Flex could be used for some slick widgetry. The folks at Snipperoo also generated some live blogging coverage and ProgrammableWeb.com did a wrap-up. I took some photos that can be found here.

There were also number of companies that used Widget Live! as a launching pad for announcements:

• AOL launched a revamped development site at: dev.aol.com
• Fox launched Spring Widgets which combines web and desktop widget functionality into one product
• FeedBurner announced the partnership with Fox Interactive Media to help control the display of widgets in the Spring Widgets product
• NVIDIA acquired PortalPlayer
• Freewebs announced Mooglets a web widget dashboard
• Goowy unleashed yourminis a slick flash-based web dashboard
• Clearspring launched a revamped widget marketplace
• Netvibes founder and ceo Tariq Krim gave insight into the growth of the personal homepage and communicated plans at expand the site to be localized in60 countries
• The virtual chumby was introduced as the actual chumby (see what is a chumby?) has not yet been released for purchase

Additionally there were event wrap-ups by Niall Kennedy, Emily Chang and Mike Jones who hinted at the level of innovation in saying:

“ Om + Niall's Widgets conference was good today - potentially even more forward thinking than tomorrows Web 2.0 conference.”

If having a conference dedicated to widgets wasn't enough to highlight all that is widgety, Steve Rubel reports that the W3C has introduced a draft proposal for a new Widget standard. The most interesting section of the proposal is the Widget autodiscovery section which, similar to feed autodiscovery, enables a webpage to tell a browser and other applications if  there is a widget associated with the page. I am glad to see the W3C taking a crack at standardizing widgets  asking for input from the widget generating community.

Widgets Live & Web 2.0 Week in SF

I just arrived in San Francisco after a long evening of traveling for a week of web 2.0 festivities. I am attending a widgets festival conference tomorrow called Widgets Live which I previewed previously. The conference was organized by Niall Kennedy and Om Malik (thank you both for pulling this together) and features a number of widget topics:

• Mobile widgets
• Hardware widgets
• Widget Aggregators
• Blog sidebar widgets
• Homepage widgets
• Desktop widget engines

If widgets are a new idea to you it might be a good idea to check out this article which tries to address the question, What is a widget? If you are planning on attending conference this week - drop me a comment or an email. I look forward to meeting you.

Though widgets have become a rather hot topic lately, Widgets Live is not the only dog and pony show related to the web in San Francisco this week.

Web 2.0 Conference/Summit is also taking place this week and is quite possibly the hottest ticket in town. It is an expensive and difficult ticket to secure as Chris Perillo has confirmed with this timely comic on bLaugh. Nonetheless, the Valley will be buzzing this week so I imagine there will be a bunch of product announcements - it should be a entertaining week in the Bay area.

Google Seeks Growth Via Custom Search

Google has launched a custom search engine today (October 24, 2006) called Google Co-op. Co-op enables  a user to create and launch a customized search engine which includes just a few specific websites. This should make for an interesting competition between a crowd of other products which includes Rollyo, Eurekster Swicki and Yahoo Search Builder. According to the Financial Time report:

"Users of Google Custom Search Engine will be able to select the websites they want to be included in their searches, and add to this list in future by “tagging” websites they visit. Any searches will then return results just from that slice of the Google search index."

This launch does not surprise me as Google has been missing out on search growth in the hot vertical search market.

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