Archive for February, 2007

Zpeech lets you make notes for the web

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 28, 2007 in Reviews, Web, Web 2.0, Features and News. 2 Comments

Zpeech is a new service that does an interesting take on website comments/reviews. It adds a floating message board (called zpeechboard) to every and any web site, where you can read other people’s comments and comment on the site itself. How does it do that? Simple - add zpeech.com/ in front of an URL, and the browser will open a live webpage identical to its standard appearance, with the addition of the zpeechboard. Anyone can read the comments, but only registered users can add new comments.

Example? www.zpeech.com/franticindustries.com enables you to comment on this site. The service is very new, so there aren’t many comments yet - for the biggest discussion yet go to www.zpeech.com/google.com.

Zpeech’s business model seems to be AdSense, as the zpeechboard has a small (and unobtrusive) AdSense box inside of it. I don’t see the costs of developing and maintaining Zpeech as really high, so a simple advertising model might work for them.

There are many things to like about Zpeech. First, its simplicity. You don’t have to register to use it; you only have to remember one word - zpeech - to be able to use it on any computer, as you can simple add URLs to zpeech.com/, however if you’re not keen on typing you can do it via the available bookmarklet, too. Furthermore, I like the idea of a disjointed message board for the entire web, it’s one of those ideas that are really simple yet quite usable. The zpeechboard looks nice, works well, and it can be resized, maximized and minimized, which means it won’t get in your way while you’re actually browsing the site.

As far as bad sides go, it’s already quite obvious that the little zpeechboard will very soon become cluttered, and after a couple of pages of comments probably completely unusable. Simplicity works up to a certain degree, but then some organizational features must take over, otherwise it will become a mess. Also, while commenting on sites is nice, it’s basically all you can do with Zpeech. The service is begging for more options. My proposition to the authors is this: the next feature to add to Zpeech should be voting on comments, and threshold to hide the buried comments, just like on Digg. This will greatly add to the actual usefulness of the comments and it will hide the clutter.

Zpeech is a fun little service, but it’s hard to predict if it’s really going to raise a great deal of interest or not. It also has a fair share of competitors, one that springs to mind is Gabbly which offers a disjointed chat board instead of a message board. It’s nicely done, has a zero learning curve, and it works well, but I think it needs a couple more killer features to become really useful.

Netvibes launches new version, named Coriander

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 28, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 0 Comments

The customizable home page / personal portal / webtop Netvibes is today launching the previously announced new version of their service, codenamed Coriander. The features will be introduced gradually, but at the time of this writing Netvibes is down and when it goes up again it will have several new features online.

Coriander brings a new look for Netvibes and resizable columns, both non-essential but nice enough features. Also, you can now browse through a feed even after you exceed the display limit - for example, if you have a box set up to show the latest 5 items in the feed, you can now click next to get to the next 5 feeds and so on. Lastly, as announced at FOWA conference in London, with Coriander Netvibes should start supporting OpenID - we’ll see if it happens right away or if it’s one of the features that will be introduced later.

Judging by the announced features the changes in Coriander won’t be as big to warrant a full-featured review, but as soon as it goes up I’ll post any interesting new features if I find them.

*Update: Netvibes is now up, but at times it’s incredibly sluggish, and the problem seems to be linked with the new ‘Coriander’ visual theme (which, by the way, features rounded corners for boxes). I don’t recommend switching to it until this problem is resolved.

Digg’s bury feature dismantled

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 27, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 3 Comments

Lately a discussion is going on among Digg users on whether Digg’s bury feature should be public, in the sense that everyone would see who buried which story. Regardless of the outcome of the debate, it turns out that the bury feature already is public. Muhammad Saleem over at Pronet Advertising, together with David LeMieux has discovered a way to see who buried which story. Muhammad tells me that it is no longer possible to do this, but it is still possible to analyze already gathered data.

Needless to say, it was easy to spot some indications of the legendary bury brigade - a popular name for users who go about burying every story that doesn’t fit their idea of what Digg’s front page should contain. To me, there was never a trace of doubt that some users will simply go and bury stories regardless of their quality, based on personal preferences, title they don’t like, or something else. However, the interesting thing would be to actually catch bigger groups working together to eradicate entire topics they don’t want to see on Digg. I’m looking at Digg Spy quite often, and as far as I could see such occurences are rare. But with more and more political stories on Digg, which are obviously being buried a lot by those with opposing political views, it might become a real problem for Digg, and this latest development will - if nothing else - raise some more awareness about this issue.

Microsoft’s Photosynth reviewed - now as a Firefox plugin

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 27, 2007 in Reviews, Web, Web 2.0, Features and News. 5 Comments

Sometimes it surprises me to see that Microsoft still does really interesting research and very innovative products. One of them is Photosynth, a photo-mashup application which creates a collage of photos giving you an interesting new way to visually browse through photographs.

A couple of days ago a Firefox plugin for Photosynth was launched. I’ve tried it out, and I must admit that I can’t remember being blown away by an application, especially an online/mashup application, like I did now. I completely agree with Ali’s enthusiasm about this product over at EverybodyGoTo. You simply have to try it out.

Photosynth does the following: it takes a bunch of photographs of the same space, calculates the relations between them, positions them visually according to these relations, creates a 3D map of the photographed object, and then enables you to browse the photographs by rotating and zooming in on this 3D map and “lock on” the photographs of its various parts. You can browse in “standard” scene view (the 3D map view) or you can switch to the quite different, but also useful similarity mode, which arranges the photos by similarity instead of geographically. Currently you can browse through only 4 different photo collections, but this is just a technology preview. I reckon that this product will be used together with a service like Flickr, where millions of photos could be interconnected into an interactive map.

This way of browsing through photographs is not only incredibly fun - it is also Web 2.0 at its best. The more photographs there are, the more details and different views you get. Therefore, it’s a true community tool. It is also quite useful. If you’re an architecture student studying on the cathedral in Milan, there is no better way of finding out about it than this. Actually, whenever you want visual details about a certain place - and that’s often - I can’t imagine a better tool than Photosynth.

Also, the interface is groundbreaking. It’s a stunning, fluid, Sci-Fi movie worthy marvel that you can’t stop playing with once you try it out. On top of that, it’s quite fast and bug-free.

Simply put, Photosynth is the best product that came out of Microsoft in a long time, and although it’s still just a technology preview, I advise everyone to try it out - you won’t regret it. Check out some screenshots below. To find out more about the technology behind this project, go to photo tourism.

photosynth_2.jpg

photosynth_1.jpg

Ning v2 reviewed - create your own social network

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 27, 2007 in Reviews, Web, Web 2.0 and Features. 12 Comments

When I come across an interesting service I usually try to find other similar services and do a roundup. There are too many new startups being launched every day, and one of the purposes of this site is to sift through them and give the readers only the best. However, in the case of Ning, it’s pretty unique in its own space. It’s a meta-social network, which means it enables users to create their own social networks and community sites. In the simplest of terms, Ning attempts to be for MySpace (but not only MySpace, we’ll get to that) what Blogger is for blogs. This approach definitely has potential, but it need not always be successful: remember Crispynews, the site that offered the users a way to create their own Digg-like site, which recently closed its doors.

I’ve stumbled upon my first objection to Ning in the very first step of using it. I’ve registered under the user name franticindustries, but after I’ve tried to create my own social network under the same name, it wasn’t possible because the word “franticindustries” is already reserved as a user name. This is not good. If it must be like that, users should at least be warned. I cannot even delete this user in order to create a network under that name, which means that I’m screwed for good. This is not a huge problem, but it’s a problem I’d like to see fixed.

Instead of franticindustries, I’ve settled for a simpler name: frantic.ning.com (join it, it’s fun, it has a forum which I don’t feel like setting up on this site). Creating your own network is as simple as can be. Choose a name, tagline, description, a couple of tags and an image. Then, drag the features you want (photos, videos, text box, RSS, blog, forum) and arrange them in a simple visual tool which represents your future site. Choose the appearance, you can choose from a predefined layout, customize it or create a new one. Set up a couple more settings (public/private etc.), and the desired questions which will be given to the members that sign up for your new network, and you’re done. All this is done very well - it’s simple, and I don’t think it will confuse inexperienced users, while pros will be able to customize their site pretty thoroughly.

The features that I’ve chosen - blog, forum, photos - all work exactly as expected. Actually, it’s all so simple to set up and use that I’ve immediately created another Ning mini-community for private use with my friends, which is definitely a great use for this service. Ning v2 has been in development for over a year, and it shows - I haven’t found any bugs at all yet, which is a rare feat.

*update: while the building-your-site phase is polished quite well, the networking is still buggy, which I’ve discovered only after I’ve invited some friends to join my network. For a while, all the subsites were unavailable. Now, the invite feature doesn’t work - and I’ve tried both ways, e-mail and through Ning. So, there is still some ironing to do for Ning admins before the service really becomes useful.

Does Ning lack something? Sure. With an application like this, you can practically name countless features it could introduce, and I’m sure it will never manage to please everyone. One distant possibility that springs to mind is RSVC (read submit vote comment) Digg-like functionality, which many users will surely appreciate. But at this stage, Ning covers the basics (and then some) quite well. As I’ve said, it’s not only a competitor to MySpace - it’s also a free forum, or a free blog. You can use as much or as little of Ning as you’d like to. And Ning pulls all this off while not overwhelming the users with zillions of features. So, while it doesn’t have everything, but it’s OK, they can add more stuff as they go along.

Franticindustries on Ning

Visually, you can set your site as you like, but even out of the box it stomps over MySpace’s legendary ugliness which has always kept me away from the most popular social network. I’ve used one of the predefined layouts and I hardly feel the need to change anything, which says a lot since I’m usually a customization fanatic.

If you wonder what’s Ning’s business model, it’s visible right away in the right hand sidebar - Google AdSense. It’s there on every new created site. The option to upgrade to an ad-free, paid account (on which you can run your own ads) is a logical business option for Ning, and it’s exactly what they’ve done. The price? $19.95 per month. Read more about it in the help or at Ning’s official blog. All I can say that for beginners the price point seems a little steep, but if you build a social network on Ning and it kicks off it would definitely be worth it to switch to a paid account.

Ning will make an impact. It’s a perfect solution for users to create small social networks for family and friends, sandbox and experiment with ideas that might one day become large social networks, or just have fun. In the crowded social network arena, it’s the logical step forward. It gives you a lot of free, well built online applications while keeping it all simple enough for everyone to use. The only thing that worries me is this quote from the help:

“We don’t offer a version of Ning that you can run on your own servers and it’s not on our roadmap. Sorry about that. If running your new social network on your own servers is important to you, drop us a line and we’ll give you some other options.”

It means that you’re dependant on them. It’s not an open platform. If you build a successful social network using Ning, you live and die with Ning. When I started this site last year, I’ve tried it out on Blogger first. Switching from Blogger to my own Wordpress powered blog with my hosting and domain was not exactly enjoyable, but it was still a 2-day affair. You can’t really do that with a social network: it would cost you thousands of dollars to recreate the same functionality independently from Ning. So, while I do like Ning and I think that it’s a great and useful service, I would like to see them change that roadmap a bit and add the possibility of using Ning as a platform on your own servers.

Ning, the meta-MySpace, relaunches

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 26, 2007 in Reviews, Web, Web 2.0 and News. 4 Comments

Ning enables anyone to create their own MySpace-like mini-community. The service has existed in beta for over one year, and today it will relaunch with a new interface and new functionality. This is not just a makeover - it’s the push the service sorely needed since it was, well, pretty damn hard to use in its initial state.

The service is currently down now running, and you can see some screenshots of Ning over at Techcrunch. Come back here later today for a full hands-on review. Read the full review of Ning V2 here.

Visual search engine Quintura gets a new interface

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 26, 2007 in Reviews, Web, Web 2.0 and News. 3 Comments

As announced by TechCrunch, the Moscow-based visual search engine Quintura has relaunched with a new interface today. It enables you to search through a combination of text input and browsing through a tag cloud of related terms, which give results on mouseover for quick apprehension.

When approaching new search solutions, the simplest way for me to try out the usefulness of a service is to act like I’m searching Google. With Quintura, the results were disappointing. It’s pretty much useless for finding something specific. It’s nice for contextual browsing, much like Wikipedia article-hopping, and finding previously undiscovered content, but if you want to find that article on radioactive cats you’ve read last week, forget it.

Additionally, the tag cloud is quite confusing - sometimes the terms will overlap each other, and sometimes they’ll move around, seemingly without any clear purpose. The back button will get you back to the previous results on the right side, but not the tag cloud results, which makes backtracking near-impossible. Also, the tag cloud browsing works pretty fast from a technical standpoint (new search results must load on every mouseover), but from a user standpoint it still seemed too slow for me - and better speed might very well be impossible to achieve.

If you’re ready to deal with its shortcomings, Quintura might be a nice tool for research, studying, casual browsing and finding new stuff. However, as a search tool it’s nowhere near the big guns like Google or Yahoo!. Do I see it making a big impact in the search field? Honestly, no.

*Update: after a bit more playing around with Quintura, I’ve realized that it’s actually not a search engine - it uses Yahoo’s search results pulled from their XML and wraps the tag cloud bit around that. It’s noted under Quintura’s search results, but it’s also easy to check: try the same search in Quintura and Yahoo! and you’ll get the same results. There’s nothing really wrong with this, except the fact that the service is dependent on Yahoo! and that it’s just a tiny bit less interesting this way.

BitTorrent launches digital media store; the world says ‘meh’

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 26, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 3 Comments

The announced launch of BitTorrent’s new commercial service, BitTorrent Entertainment Network, where users will be able to buy TV episodes and rent movies, has gone as planned, and the service is now open.

I suspect that’s just about the only thing that will go as planned, since the name “BitTorrent” has been synonymous with free movie downloads in the last couple of years, and you only need to remember Napster to know that commercial download services born from free P2P systems don’t go over too well.

BEN might have had the chance if the service were actually any good, however it will only use the BitTorrent protocol as the way to distribute data, and you will only be able to buy TV-shows (at $1.99 per episode), while the movies will be DRM-laden files which will auto-destroy in 24 hours after you first watch them. This protection will, of course, be circumvented soon by some 13 year old kid, but I doubt anyone will care about BEN enough to take notice. In a time when even major Hollywood production houses are considering dropping DRM, starting a service with severe DRM restrictions on the content is, at the very least, a gamble. The only good thing BEN has got going for them is the fact that they’re planning to offer free ad-supported TV shows in the future.

The prices for the movies will be $3.99 for new releases and $2.99 for older ones, but, as Matthew Ingram correctly predicts, the problem isn’t the price - the problem is DRM. Ironically, the name “BitTorrent” will make the situation worse. It’s easier to shove DRM down the throats of non-tech-savvy people than to the people who know what BitTorrent means and who have been using it to download DRM-free stuff for years.

Well, at least the design of the website is nice.

15 free services worth paying for - readers’ choice

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 25, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and Features. 9 Comments

Since the response to my question on which services you’d keep using if they weren’t free - and yes, it was primarily a question - has been great, I’ll call it a successful poll and post the results here.

Let me just emphasize a couple of points which might have been misunderstood in the original article.

It’s naive to think that asking this question is bad because it’s giving the owners of these services the idea to start charging for them. People who sit at Google and Netvibes and Yahoo headquarters know very well what their business options are, and there’s a very good reason why they’re offering these services for free. The question is, however, worth asking, because this situation may change in the future. Users’ dependency on online applications will grow. AdSense might not always be the major driving force behind the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Secondly, sometimes free is not really free. If you’re a working man/woman, then time is money. Whatever saves you time, earns you money. Whatever wastes your time, costs you money. If it takes considerable time and effort to switch from one free service to another, then the cost of switching is not zero any more.

Example: let’s say you’re using Gmail every day. It’s your primary e-mail reader. Would you rather give $5 a month for this product, or would you transfer all your mail to another product and having to change your address, and spend days learning the intricacies of this new service, discovering that many of its features don’t work quite as they did in Gmail? I’m not saying that there’s a correct answer here. I just wanted to know what the answer was.

So, to rephrase my initial question: which free services and products that you are using now are valuable to you in the sense that you would pay a reasonable fee to be able to keep using them? (just to clarify, i was referring to online applications & services, but some readers also named free desktop products in their lists)

Although some readers said that they wouldn’t pay for anything web-based, which is perfectly OK, many readers did name a couple of services and products they find valuable enough to pay for them. Here’s a top 15 list, extracted from the comments in the original article:

1. Firefox (12 votes)
2. Gmail (11 votes)
3. Digg (9 votes)
4. Google Search (8 votes)
4. Wikipedia (8 votes)
6. YouTube (6 votes)
7. Wordpress (5 votes)
8. Feedburner (3 votes)
8. Blogger (3 votes)
8. Technorati (3 votes)
8. del.icio.us (3 votes)
11. Adium (2 votes)
11. Netvibes (2 votes)
11. Google Reader (2 votes)
11. Flickr (2 votes)

Some runners-up, taken from the comments on Digg, are Slashdot, Fark, Opera, Google Analytics, and IMDB.

Some conclusions

What have we learned from this discussion? First of all, many users still cannot accept the idea of paying for online services and online applications. This is hardly a surprise: if it were any different, then many Web 2.0 startups would have a subscription-based business model, something which is currently a rare occurrence.

To understand why this happens, we must consider why these same people have absolutely no problem paying for desktop applications. The price tag on non-free desktop applications is a derivative of many factors, some of which are:

- intrinsic quality of the application/service
- robustness and quality of the platform the application/service is based on
- the potential value the service/application can create
- customer support

It’s easy to understand why online apps are not quite there yet. Their platform is the web, and it’s definitely not as robust as your standard desktop/network environment. Also, many online applications are just ‘light’ versions of full desktop applications, which creates the notion that they must be free.

In this light, the above list makes a lot of sense. People would be willing to pay for either quality desktop applications (Firefox), great blogging platforms (Blogger, Wordpress) or online applications which provide value that cannot be replicated with a desktop app (Flickr, Google Search, FeedBurner, Technorati). They are also willing to pay for services that provide quality information, like Wikipedia or Digg, and many of them would be willing to pay to keep the quality of these services on the current level.

There are a lot of valuable lessons to be learned here. Online applications that seek for business models other than advertising cannot be just online copies of desktop apps. It just won’t work until they are really better than their desktop counterparts, and until the web as a platform offers sufficient security, privacy, storage, speed, reliability and robustness. Applications like Picnik or Zamzar are nice, but people will use them if and only if they’re free.

Secondly, the community increases the switching cost. No wonder Firefox is topping the list: many people cannot imagine switching to any other browser, not only because Firefox is very good (Opera is good, too), but because of the thousands of extensions which cannot easily be replaced (this is illustrated well in the comments on the original article, where many users named some Firefox extension as a product worth paying for). Digg, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Wordpress - sure, there is an alternative for all of these, but the community around them is strong, and the community adds the value - be it in Wikipedia’s numerous articles, quotations and corrections, or the many Wordpress plugins, or YouTube’s millions of videos. You can switch from Digg to Reddit (or vice-versa), but you lose your friends, your diggs, your comments - and all those are worth something. You can switch from Flickr to some other service, but Flickr has all your photos and all your friends photos, and all of your friends’ friends photos, and you cannot move all that with you.

Thirdly, in the world of online applications and services, being first means a lot. Much more than in the realm of desktop applications. Many companies were the first and the best with their desktop application (remember Netscape?) but they lost it all when a better or a cheaper app came along. However, when you’re the first to create a popular online application, and it results in a thriving community, runners-up will have a hard time catching up. The community is the added value you cannot simply conjure out of thin air, and no amount of funding can help you there.

All this makes for an interesting future as far as online apps and services go. There is still no clear business model for them to adopt, and although there are some signs showing the way, no one has the guts to make the plunge. A huge majority of services will obviously have to stay free, for reasons stated above, and keep working with an advertisement-based business model. But as Web 2.0 applications become more and more complex, robust and usable for business purposes some of them will not be able to survive on ads alone, and will be forced to pave a new way. Google will definitely be a forerunner here. Its introduction of Google Checkout is no accident - it will most probably be instrumental in monetizing many of their services. With their Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per person per year and is aimed at business users, they’ve made the first tiny step. They are offering the same thing free but if you want support and reliability, you must pay a reasonable fee. We’ll see if they’ll succeed in convincing the world that sometimes, free is not the best choice.

Digg unbans several banned domains

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 23, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 6 Comments

As many of you know, Digg hasn’t really got the world’s most transparent policy on banning domains. If many Digg users mark a domain as spam, it might get banned, but it also might get banned for other reasons. This resulted in many popular domains from some very prominent bloggers like Seth Godin or Paul Stamatiou on the banned list.

Well, as reported by Pronet Advertising, Digg unbanned several previously banned domains.

The unconfirmed list of unbanned domains (courtesy of Pronet Advertising) is:

This is good news, because many have felt that Digg’s banning policies were unjust, and I tend to agree. Many of the sites on this list were definitely not splogs - some of them have barely any advertising - and yet they were banned for being “spam”. Still, it doesn’t mean that this enables webmasters to do what they want. There is a lot of unwritten rules on Digg, which should be followed if you don’t want to get banned. Example: to test if he was really unbanned, John Chow submitted one of his articles to Digg. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, but he should know by now that Diggers don’t like when you submit your own articles.

Microsoft loses 1.5 billion over MP3 patent

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 23, 2007 in Software and News. 4 Comments

Microsoft was ordered by a federal jury to pay $1.52 billion to Lucent-Alcatel for violating their MP3-related patents. Basically, Microsoft products (Windows Media Player) play MP3s. And now they have to pay for it.

If you’re wondering what does Lucent-Alcatel have to do with MP3, the answer is: not much. But MP3 was developed by Bell Labs, which was bought by Lucent. Bell Labs developed the MP3 format together with the Fraunhofer institute, and Microsoft (and others) have settled the matter with them, however Lucent-Alcatel also hold patents for some aspects of the technology, and now they want their share.

The consequences of this decision are immense. Anyone who ever used MP3 technology might have to pay millions (or billions) of dollars to Lucent-Alcatel simply for using the format. For some, it may mean abandoning this format, which in turn means that the users will suffer the consequences, too.

As much as it’s nice to see Microsoft nailed for software patents, something they’d very gladly do to someone else whenever they have the chance, this is a good time to remember what a smart guy has to say about software patents and why they shouldn’t exist.

Services you’d keep using if they weren’t free

Published by
Stan Schroeder
at February 22, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and Features. 78 Comments

Google’s announcement of Google Apps Premier Edition and its acceptable price tag of $50 per person per year got me thinking which online services that are currently free would I keep using even if I had to start paying money for using them.

Just to put things into perspective, my income can be described as average, and I certainly can’t afford to throw money for things I don’t really need. I love free lunch as much as the next guy. However, out of many Web 2.0 services I’m using, some have become so important to me and my work that I would gladly pay a reasonable fee if I had to.

So, for me these are:

Netvibes (Daily Rotation is a close second in the online RSS reader field). Simply put, the first webpage I open every day, and I keep it open throughout the day. I read all of my RSS in there, and I use many additional modules.

Google Calendar. Well, it’s hard to imagine this app not being free, but still - I’ve tried all of the other online calendars and I’ve settled for this one, because it’s simple, fast, it looks good, it supports iCal, it can send me SMS notifications, and it’s integrated with other Google services.

Wordpress. Simply put, the best blogging platform around. If I had to pay a reasonable price for using it, I’d do it.

Google Maps. I’ve got so used to Google Maps that I’d could hardly go without them.

Yahoo! Pipes - not quite there yet, but it’s definitely one of the applications that might prove very valuable for me, and, as such, worth paying a small fee.

Runners up:

Joost - small fee for an ad-free version? I’d think about it.
Techmeme - quality tech news are my job. Techmeme delivers. If only there weren’t so many others news sources out there…

These were my favorites, but I’d love to hear about your favorites. Feel free to name them in the comments!

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