SOMEWHAT FRANK

Shoeboxed Organizes Your Shopping History

After two of the biggest shopping days of the year Black Friday and Cyber-Monday respectively I figured it was probably important to make sure you save your receipts. You may throw them in your wallet, purse or in a shoebox under your bed somewhere. With Shoeboxed you can save all your receipts in one place online. Shoeboxed aims to make it easy to keep track of your own personal shopping history by offering an online repository with sprinkles of social candy to make sharing it easy to share some of your personal shopping history.

Microsoft Buys Into Facebook (Is it Overvalued?), StumbleUpon Adds Search, Webshots Sold, UK Bans File Sharing & Startup and Bootstraping Tips

Photo of the Week: With Halloween right around the corner this photo seemed appropriate.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 10.28.2007

Are You A Shareaholic?

Shareaholic makes it easy to submit the web page you are currently viewing in a Firefox browser to Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Google bookmarks, Magnolia, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Twitter.

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!

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. 

Walk2Web: Walk Don't Stumble The Web

With StumbleUpon recently acquired for somewhere between $60 and $75 million it has brought other similar sites into the spotlight as the search is on for the next Stumble. StumbleUpon leverages a stupid  plain simple approach to enable its users to discover new places and videos on the web. If you are not one to "stumble," you might want to give "walking the web" a try with Walk2Web.

Walk2Web, created by San Jose-based Siteheart, uncovers new places on the web in a similar simple fashion to that of StumbleUpon but has its own gimmicky twist. Instead of stumbling, a user is presented a slide-show of random web site screen-shot thumbnails. Upon clicking on one of the site screen-shots a user is shown a visual representation of the related sites and a user can "walk" to other related sites. In addition a user can type in a direct URL to "walk" the web. Using Somewhat Frank as an example, I have captured a screen-shot (below) that shows how associated sites are presented.

Though Walk2Web offers an anonymous user experience, a user must sign-in to have the ability to rate any site with thumbs up or thumbs down, save the site to public or private bookmarks, tag the site and comment on the site.

Walk2Web has some work ahead of it if it strives for a StumbleUpon glory, as I did find some issues with the site. For example, I could not find an easy way back to the homepage slideshow and I could not find a way to see my bookmarks and ratings. All issues aside, I feel the concept of "walking the web" could be something people come to enjoy.

Bottom-line: Walk2Web offers a simple yet interesting way to discover, bookmark and rate places on the web.