Sponsorised links
15 February 2006
Podbop
by 13 othersMashup that combines concert information from Eventful with freely available MP3s. This allows you to find upcoming concerts in your area and immediately listen to MP3s from the bands. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for every city. Unlike a lot of mashups, Podbop is an extremely useful service. Unfortunately, not all cities are covered right now.
Riya
by 14 othersPhoto recognition service. After training Riya to recognize a face, it can automatically identify that person in all your photos. It can also recognize text within images. An astoundingly good service that solves a real problem. But ultimately it might be better to integrate Riya with current photo-sharing services, rather than building yet another consumer-facing application.
Staralicious
by 3 othersDigg for celebrities. A fun idea, but hopefully not a serious business proposition. Seems to be built on the open source Pligg software, hence the massive similarities to Digg. A number of other vertical Digg clones launched recently, including StockDigg (Digg for investors).
Stickam
by 5 othersMultimedia widget for your blog or website. It has video and photo sharing capabilities, but the major selling point is live video streaming - users can stream video from their webcam and conduct video chats. The technology is pretty darned good, but it's more appealing to the MySpace and LiveJournal crowd than your average blogger.
Mint
Website stats package with a jaw-droppingly gorgeous interface. Costs $30 per domain. Users need to set up a database on their own server, so it's really a tool for those with technical knowledge. Google Analytics is a good alternative - it's also free.
Sponsorised links
14 February 2006
Wists
by 22 othersWists aims to be a social shopping site, but it's really something much simpler - del.icio.us with images. Like most bookmarking services, you add a bookmarklet to your browser and click it whenever you find a page that interests you. Wists will grab all the images from the page and let you choose which one to attach to your bookmarklet. You can also take a screenshot of the entire page, but this is fairly unreliable. The obvious business model is advertising similar products to those that have been bookmarked. Unsurprisingly, a lot of users aren't using the service for shopping - Wists might be wise to embrace these alternative uses.
Wikispaces
by 19 othersAnother hosted wiki service. Targeted towards community groups, book clubs, fan clubs and the like. Wikis can be public (editable by anyone), read-only or private. The private version costs $5 per month or $50 per year. The pages are fairly ugly and the interface could do with some work. Fairly average, but certainly points towards how wikis could be utilized by all kinds of community groups.
Co.mments
by 13 othersA new tool to help you track comments on blogs. Although it's tempting to make a comparison with the recently-launched CoComment, the two services are slightly different. Instead of logging your comments when you hit "submit", Co.mments creates a feed of any comment thread, whether or not you contributed to it. Very limited in scope.
13 February 2006
Buzznet
by 28 othersPhoto and video sharing community. The interface is poorly designed and it's not clear what the site is trying to be. Is it MySpace for photos? Is it YouTube for the Facebook crowd? The site's lack of direction seems to be reflected in its low traffic in comparison to Flickr, YouTube and more focused social networking sites. A classic example of trying to be all things to all people.
Megite
by 10 othersProbably the second or third-best memetracker after Memeorandum. Delivers good results in a broad range of categories, but needs a lot of work on the interface. They've just added a feature that lets you import your OPML file - Megite will then create a personalized page based on the blogs you read. Not a bad service, but startlingly similar to Memeorandum in terms of layout.
Zillow
by 25 othersHome valuation service. Notable because it has raised $32 million in venture funding, has 75 employees and was created by Richard Barton, founder of Expedia. The service itself is good - some have questioned its accuracy in certain locations, but I'm told that's going to improve. It makes sense to empower the public with this data, but if the aim is to revolutionize real estate, they've got a long way to go.
Qoop
by 11 othersPhoto printing service. Prints your photos from Flickr, Tribe, TextAmerica and others. Pretty good. The strategy appears to be to partner with as many sites as possible. Ultimately, they need an API so that developers can integrate photo printing into their services. Potential rivals include Zazzle, Blurb and the excellent Cafepress.
Chuquet
by 1 otherMemetracker along the lines of Memeorandum and Blogniscient. Megite is also gaining ground in this space. Aside from the horrific orange interface, Chuquet delivers some interesting results. Nonetheless, it feels like a work in progress. Most users will stick with Memeorandum for the time being.
LinkedFeed
by 3 othersAnother ajax startpage (aka web-based desktop) along the lines of Netvibes. It also has a recommendation system - you can vote on the RSS items you read and it will use this data to suggest new items. I'm not too optimistic about this - if you can't export the recommendations to another RSS reader, it's next to useless. What's more, it's likely that your attention data (what you click on and read, the news that interests you most) may soon be baked into OPML, meaning you could take this data with you when you switch feedreaders. This would make siloed systems like LinkedFeed redundant.
12 February 2006
StikiPad
by 18 othersHosted wiki solution. There's a very limited free version and the paid versions cost between $5 and $15 per month. This pricing sounds fair and the interface is usable and intuitive. Basecamp is another option, but personally I find all these hosted wikis a bit limited - ideally, web software should be extensible. A good strategy is to release your code as open source (like the Wordpress blog software) and allow developers to create their own themes and plugins. You can then provide a hosted solution (like Wordpress.com) that takes advantage of this extensibility.
BubbleShare
by 46 othersPhoto-sharing community. Unlike Flickr, which encourages you to share your photos with the world, the site is focused on private sharing. Since most mainstream users are hesitant to expose their identities online, this fills a nice gap in the market. When it comes to exploring the photos of others, Bubbleshare isn't so good - there are no tags and most users keep their photos private anyway. There's no network effect here, but I'm not sure that matters. Flickr for the masses, perhaps.
Blurb
by 4 othersDownloadable application that lets you create a printed book from your images or blog entries. Qoop, Lulu, Cafepress and Zazzle are all excellent services when it comes to printing your own creations, but ease of use is still a sticking point. It can't possibly take on the big guys, but if Blurb can make the process pain-free, it might be able to get some traction.
11 February 2006
Blogniscient
by 8 othersA memetracker that scans the blogosphere to find the latest news on politics, tech, sports, entertainment and business. Similar to Memeorandum, but results aren't as good. Although the interface is attractive, a lot of space is wasted - the news items should be given more prominence. Nonethless, it provides a broader view of the blogosphere with more categories than Memeorandum.
YouTube
by 164 others (via)Popular video-sharing community. Very impressive. Includes tagging, groups, playlists, channels and all kinds of interactive features. Also makes it easy for you to display videos on your blog or website. Excellent site - it will no doubt be acquired soon.
Mayomi
by 26 others (via)Web-based mind mapping. Create mind maps online and explore the mind maps of others. There's a lot of unrealized potential here - mind maps should be more public and you should be able to link to a mind map directly. It would also be nice to subscribe to mindmaps or export them elsewhere. But since the site is in Flash, these features might be tricky to code.
Vimeo
by 56 othersVideo sharing community - essentially "Flickr for video". Not a bad attempt, but they waste their homepage introducing their service (it should be used to highlight interesting videos). Also, the interaction with other users is limited. YouTube is doing a much better job in this space - it has groups, playlists, channels and all kinds of viral features.
