Tag: site reviews

Netvibes rocks

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

If you’re looking for a page to start your travels on the Internets each time you log on, try Netvibes.com. It takes a while to customize, but when you do you get your favorite RSS feeds and widgets all recently updated on one page, plus special apps for Gmail, del.icio.us and Twitter.

Pageflakes has a slightly prettier look (which makes it slower) and makes it easy for anyone to set up a customized public page (Netvibes “Universes” are still for the big organizations) and Google Reader is faster for full article reading, but as a start page Netvibes is the site of the moment.

Humans and rats battle it out for second place in search

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

I’ve already tried to pour cold water all over Wikia, and I remain a skeptic on Spock. To the point: the machine powered search algorithms used by companies like Google and Technorati actually aggregate human decisions in a much more effective market-style system than small teams of web professionals judging what content is relevant. The search engines said to be community powered are interesting, but the idea that they will be able to give people what they want more effectively is elitism run amok, an attempt to build a new online “mainstream media” establishment when no such thing is needed, and an admirable but forlorn attempt to substitute labor for capital and taste for popularity.

Oh, I forgot, this is some well-intentioned attempt to save the world from SEO spam. What nonsense.

I had held out on writing a sour note that ripped on Mahalo because I like the idea that people believe that someone might seriously challenge Google in search in the next decade. It’s a silly belief, and certainly not an analysis of any sort, but it is amusing and maybe even a bit inspiring.

What a time to start an Internet business. It will take a very long time, warns Mahalo chief Jason Calcanis, before the search engine will really work well. Or make much money. How convenient.

As a practical matter, most searches end in Google results and then Google ads right now.  The site has an unserious florid look and even the established results pages are pretty weak when you click on the directory-style front page.  It is a new site with apparently a good amount of investment–here’s post from May about its launch–and for now people seem inclined to take it seriously.  But after some pretty positive press about his “human-powered” search engine from Read/Write Web, Jason Calcanis gave a conference speech this week that went sour with the attendees. Dave Winer explains on his blog:

‘Yesterday, and in all his previous marketing, he rails against advertising and spam, which ironically, was exactly what he was doing to the environment at this mostly non-commercial conference. What we said (and I wasn’t the only one speaking back to him, I wasn’t even the first) was a response to this. It didn’t come out of thin air. If he had given a similar speech to venture capitalists, if he offered them no way to win, they would have had the same response, but it probably wouldn’t have been as patient or polite. Now, clearly he doesn’t have the same respect for us that he has for VCs. But it seems that to some extent the success of his company depends on winning over the people here at Gnomedex. If it didn’t, he should have stayed home, because his pitch, as delivered, doesn’t work here, because he didn’t offer us anything we want. We get a better deal from Google, believe it or not.

Some of his argument against Google rings true, very few people love them as we did in their early days, but their proposition to web writers and podcasters is basically fair, it’s a win-win. We get flow from them, they get ad revenue. They also offer us a way to put ads on our sites, so we can profit financially from the relationship. Nothing in Jason’s pitch offers us anything like that. No flow, no money. And technically, it’s not a platform, so we can’t build on it.

We’re people, and we’re smart, Jason, just like you, just like your investors. If you come making a pitch, there should be something for us, or it’s not going to be well received.

So there’s a big bug in the concept behind his company and he tries to blow by it with an attack aimed at one person. That might convince really stupid people, but smart folk can see right through it.

Bottom-line, he needs to figure out a way to build the company so that many others can profit from it. Otherwise I don’t think it has a prayer against Google, which we like less and less as a company, but who basically offers an equitable proposition to the users of the Internet, who the Gnomedex crowd represent in a loose kind of way.

His pitch here failed. He can’t blame me for that. A good CEO goes back to the drawing board and figures out what works.’

Yes, a very, very good CEO finds a way to make the “human-powered” search engine idea work. Like, work in a small niche or something.  But a CEO with a bad idea will keep trying to sell his idea as long as its plentiful funding provides a constant prima facie reminder of what a success it is.

I don’t think I write hyperbolically when I say that you’re about as likely to beat Google’s machine-powered search system now with Mahalo or another “human-powered” system as with a “rat-powered” search where rodents sniff out the best-smelling morsels.

How Last.fm creates business for Beatport

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

DJs__Love-Fest_2006_SF_CIMG1931
I think Last.fm is one of the most important sites of the web 2.0 era. It’s an Internet radio station, you’ve probably heard of it but if you haven’t tried it you should. Probably my favorite background listening when I’m relaxing is the trance tag radio station.

Many people use Last.fm’s soical networking features, and why not–for music fans it’s a great way to meet people online. But I use enough social networking stuff and the reason I go to Last.fm is for the music–because recently it’s become my favorite place to discover new music.

When I put on trance tag radio, it plays songs that others have tagged trance. Some of them don’t belong, but most of the selections do at least somewhat and it’s easy to skip to the next song anyway. And once in a while, I find a new song that I really like.

But this is where Last.fm needs an upgrade. Instead of sending me on a search on Amazon.com for the whole album, I should be able to buy the mp3 right away. They should partner with Apple iTunes or Beatport.com or build their own music store, and sell individual tracks. As of now I just head over to one of those places for the song, sometimes after finding it on Last.fm. (Tabs pose an underrated threat to e-commerce sites, because they put so much information–crucially, from different sources–on the same browser at the same time).

It’s true that other sites like di.fm have something close to that, in terms of Internet radio and a music store. But that site lacks the web 2.0 features and buzz that Last.fm has.

Now, Last.fm has a lot of good music but since so many of their listeners like rock and roll they don’t exactly specialize in electronic music the way a more focused site could–and because of the tagging and things the more listeners in a certain genre the more interesting the radio station for that genre so that means something.

Come to think of it, maybe this calls for all these ideas being thrown together into a new electronic music radio/record store site. Of course, maybe not–the market seems to be flooded already with half-baked Internet startups.

Webshots adds tagging and other features

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Is there really a major difference between users of different photo sites? Probably not, but Flickr’s preponderance in the northern California area where I seem to talk to people about photo sites belies statistics that seem to indicate that Photobucket is more popular in the country, just as Myspace is more popular than Facebook still.

Webshots.com, the photo sharing website owned by CNET [personal disclosure: it’s well known that I’m very close to someone who works there], has introduced a few new features that round out their offering and make it more competitive in the hotly contested online photo site market.

Both sites allow users to give titles and descriptions to the photos they upload, but how they handle them has been different otherwise. Flickr puts all new photos into the user’s “photo stream” and uses (optional) tags to describe photos. Webshots, which has been in the photo sharing business since the late 1990s, has always organized photos into albums. So users could select categories and give keywords for each entire album, but not tag individual photos.

This has now changed and Webshots is allowing users to put tags on each photo. This is a major evolution–they had to take the previous categories, for example, and make them work in the new system. So far it looks like it has worked well and it opens up a lot of new possibilities for user navigation.

Flickr also caught on with the web 2.0 crowd partly because it allows easy access to its API which allows users to build tools and mashups from its photos. Now that it has tags, more interest might be turned toward the API at Webshots, which currently requires special permission to access.

Another feature that really could benefit Webshots is their installation of a system called Gigya that allows users to post an individual photo to a handful of social networking sites like LiveJournal, Blogger, Myspace and Xanga. This kind of feature is essential both for allowing visitors to quickly share interesting photographs and for making the site an multi-faceted part the user’s online experience. Call it web2.0 lock-in or whatever.

While Flickr has recently confirmed that they will have video sometime soon, Webshots already managed to add video capability back in 2006.

One of the interesting facets of Flickr, and something that seems to keep many people coming back, is the popularity of the site as a social networking destination. That is to say, even with rather basic social features, Flickr still offers enough community and content to make a compelling offering to the web 2.0 crowd in the social networking space. It merits saying that Flickr is Yahoo’s most successful entry in the social networking space (sorry GeoCities and Yahoo 360).

Webshots also has some solid social networking features, and it has plenty of comments on popular photos just as Flickr does, but the user base is not as nearly concentrated in the techie demographic, so for example I would say anecdotally that I’ve seen a lot of Flickr accounts that are used as blog photo storage where I’ve only noticed that a handful of times browsing Webshots. But with the Gigya feature, more people may start using Webshots to store their blog pictures. It’s also worth noting that Flickr users are often also using Twitter, last.fm, their WordPress blog, Facebook and other cool sites–so speculatively speaking Webshots may have a bit more of the attention of its users for longer periods at a time.

The same way that many people in the web 2.0 bubble have made Flickr the site of international cool photography for the Internet crowd, many people who are digital photography fans from all the way back in the web 1.0 era continue to visit Webshots and upload their photos. Webshots has more lurkers per uploader on its site than Flickr [that part is just speculation too, by the way]–meaning more viewers per photographer. The layout of the sites is different–Webshots offers a front page with featured photos and then a handful of sections with content specific to each of them: photos selected by editors, with short descriptions and links to the albums, while Flickr offers a front page that displays four new photos by the user, four new photos by that user’s contacts, and four seemingly random photos by others on Flickr, with links to the photos but no descriptions of them by any editors.

So for people who are using a site to upload photos or keep tabs on friends, Webshots or Flickr can both work, depending on the user and what site his or her friends are on already. For the geek crowd, for example those who want to use the site’s photos to build apps, Flickr has established an early lead and has even inspired copycat sites in its own new sub-genre, like Zoomr. But for people dropping by a site looking for some entertaining photos that they can read about, download the full size of, and share easily through email or on social networks, Webshots works well and the tags should make it easier to find stuff.

Will Spock.com, a social listings service, be worth using?

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

[Title updated 8/3/2007]

I read about Spock.com on O’Reilly Radar a few months ago, and couldn’t help but be intrigued. Mr. O’Reilly wrote:

‘Michael Arrington wrote the other day about spock, the new people search engine, but I have to say that I don’t think he did it justice. Spock is really cool, and performs a unique function that is well outside the range of capabilities of current search engines. What’s more, it’s got a fabulous interface for harvesting user contribution to improve its results.

You can search for a specific person — but you can do that on Google. More importantly, you can search for a class of person, say politicians, or people associated with a topic — say Ruby on Rails. The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds (and it gathers information on people from Wikipedia, social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook), but it also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Users can also identify relationships between people (friend, co-worker, etc.), upload pictures, and provide other types of information. This is definitely a site that will get better as more people use it — one of my key tests for Web 2.0. It also illustrates the heart of a new development paradigm: using programs to populate a database, and people to improve it.’

The service is a closed beta, but I finally found a way to check it out–I left my request for it at InviteShare and moments later, I was invited. [Check that service out if you are wondering what new web2.0 stuff is coming down the pike or want to join Spock or Pownce. In fact, InviteShare itself could actually develop into a pretty cool social networking site–at least until everyone in line gets their invite to the red-hot BitTorrent closed beta sites like SuperTorrents, Demonoid.com and Torrentleech.org.]

So I got my invite and went and looked at the Spock.com site, searched a few tags and a few people, and one thing that struck me is how dependent Spock seems on Myspace profiles–useful enough for lots of people but hardly a reliable main source. Also, some sites are based on LinkedIn profiles and entries about famous people rely heavily on Wikipedia.

I think at the end of the day, if nearly everyone joins and tends to their profile (although I don’t know how much control a user has over their own profile because when I was clicking the link to finish the “claim this profile” process it repeatedly gave an error message) it will basically become a social networking aggregator, a hot field at the moment but different than what the site seems intended for.

Why will it not work as a people listing? Basically, because I don’t know how it won’t become a major spam magnet once it opens up to public users. Besides that, it has all the potential to have all the problems that Wikipedia has with user credibility, self-promotion, grudges and personal attacks.

I went in and added my web site, so now people who look at my entry can find that page alongside my less-recently-updated Myspace page. That’s pretty cool. And since you can tag people, I guess I could have tagged myself “MBA” and “Midwesterner” or stuff like that–maybe I will. But then, what’s to stop someone from going to my profile and tagging me “capitalist pig” and “hillbilly” as well? Nothing, it seems. I guess maybe I can vote those down or something–but for now that’s not enough to convince me it will work, or that in the current social networking blizzard I’d really want to spend much time using this particular site.

It’s all kind of unclear how the site will look with heavy traffic, so my observations are quite preliminary. But does Spock match the hype so far? I don’t think so.

The file sharing feature is what could matter for Pownce

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

All sorts of reviews of Pownce, a new service that has been compared to Twitter and Jaiku, have delved into the technical arguments about the Adobe AIR client, and how doesn’t Gmail send 20MB files (to Pownce’s 10MB?), and what does a pro account get you, like no ads (what ads anyway?) and 100MB file sending instead, and usually a review can’t end without an assessment of the clausterphobic world of web2.0 personalites. So I can’t compete with that here but let me add my views on the service:

(1) The single most interesting thing about Pownce is the transparent but almost intangible similarity in feel to Flickr, not a coincidence as Yahoo’s photo service is the de rigeur photo site in the web 2.0 bubble (though still not quite the most popular compared to old Photobucket in what Bob Dylan called “America”). Well the similarity in “pro accounts” stands out of course, (I think $20 to Flickr’s $25–but don’t hold me to that I don’t have a pro account now in either service) but use the web site part of Pownce for a while and see if you don’t also sense a vague similarity in look and feel.

(2) Okay, I will wade a bit into the overall debate–Pownce really is sort of a tumbleblog, but it’s not bad but not amazing, at least so far, and could work a bit like Twitter for some peoeple, and some people could use it more like AOL IM, but it really needs to be able to accept incoming feeds (the way Jaiku or Tumblr can) and have external widgets to give updates from the service on your blog. Also they need to serve up a timeline of public updates. You have to click around to find interesting pages–navigation should be done from more angles. (For now, check lead developer Leah Culver’s page for updates about the service because some of these features or others may be added–it’s in invite-only beta right now and the Adobe AIR desktop client is still in alpha.)

(3) Key among the services mentioned is the file sharing feature. I don’t have to run through the history of P2P networks like Hotline, Napster, IRC, Gnutella, Kazaa and BitTorrent here, but some of their varied histories show the vagaries of both popularity and legality of sharing files on certain networks. Pownce, on the other hand, is a new service that may offer a good deal of privacy because it works off a centralized network. Or it may not. But if it attracts a user base that makes frequent use of the file sharing feature (perhaps even files that are legal to share–if that’s even at all possible under the DMCA–I’m not a lawyer) Pownce could differentiate itself from current crop of both short messaging services and P2P networks.

pownce.jpg

Twitter and Jaiku–which one, and where to now?

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

I found an interesting article on a PBS blog about the short message service blogs. Basically the writer focuses on Twitter and gives an overall outline.
I think he may have given short shrift to Jaiku, Twitter’s nearest competitor. It is a very cool service as well and actually is a close number two right now in my opinion, with potential to overtake based on how they develop.
I’ve used both services. Check out my pages on the sites:
pacificpelican.jaiku.com
twitter.com/pacificpelican
Since my text messaging on my phone doesn’t usually send out for whatever reason, I like being able to use Twitter for messaging–people that add you as a friend can receive your tweets over their cell phone. So lately I’ve had a lot of fun using Twitter to text message my girlfriend. Twitter also allows updating from a variety of online services like Netvibes and Facebook, and GoogleTalk or AOL IM. I have been using the Twitter Tools WordPress plug-in to cross-post all of my tweets (Twitter messages) on my front page as well as generating “new blog post” when I write a new Diary entry.
Both of these services have been prone to going down or having drops in service levels on either posting public timeline updates and feed updates or in receiving messages from one or more messaging systems. But overall the quality of service has been improving.

Both services allow customized photo backgrounds on user pages, 140 word updates and rss feeds. They both offer “badges,” which are widgets in JavaScript or Flash code that can be put on your Blogger or WordPress or or your Myspace page or wherever you can place code, even your Pageflakes homepage. Don’t make your URL links too long in your messages on Twitter and Jaiku, and don’t use any HTML tags–the former will become a “tinyurl.com” address, which will work but has limitations (like being replaced with a later link you send in another message) and the latter will just appear as ungainly code text on your Twitter page.
Jaiku is a more Euro-centered version, and they are second to Twitter right now I think but they seem to better understand the pure telecom angle in this–getting large numbers of people using either or both of these services could really drive text messaging revenue for telecoms. It’s not surprising that Jaiku is selling a specialized Nokia phone, the S60.
For keeping tabs on what people are saying on the services, you can watch Twittervision 3D and Jaikuvision among many others. Another service in a similar field that I have been using is Tumblr–it’s more of a short blog (“tumbleblog”) than online short message service, which can take a single link or photo as well as a short blog (showing how photos certainly have a place as well in this geo-tagging online mapping/short messages craze–as does the very fascinating Flickrvision)–here’s my page, which mainly uses feeds to track most or all of what I post online:
pacificpelican.tumblr.com
Could these and all the other new messaging platforms all manage carve out their own niche? Twitter is known as the “What are you doing” update service and has a techier feel (for example, reply is done in a “comment on this” blog kind of style on Jaiku whereas it is done by making the @-sign and then the username being responded to the initial word of the tweet) while Jaiku has a slightly better overall web 2.0 feel on the home page. I have no clear preference, but I guess I might start preferring one more than the other depending on who’s using them or which one is more convenient at the moment–for a while I really liked Jaiku, kind of thought I had done the “switch” to it, but lately the range of tools available with Twitter has pulled me back in that direction.

So what is next for the short messaging services? Well here’s one theory. Just as blogs used to be a way for one person to write simple, off the cuff messages to a handful of interested listeners and they have grown into the enormous multi-user data-base-driven CMS-included software packages of today like WordPress, B2evolution and Movable Type, the short message services will expand enormously as they look for ways to grow by incorporating a little feature here and a small one there. What would these changes look like? Well, how about more explicit group setups, allowing people to host their own Jiaku or Twitter powered page (maybe by allowing C-name record based site like Blogger.com and livejournal.com), messaging from more IM platforms (or any in Jaiku’s case), more depth to the home pages in terms of search, features and original content, tagging, and of course, at least one of them should open their source code, or maybe a really cool open source project could be built along those lines. Well, maybe I can get Qwittr out there as one of the attempts.