Archive for June, 2007

Hahlo - Twitter Interface for iPhone

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at June 29, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 0 Comments

The iPhone hype has been so strong the last couple of days that, try as I might, I’m unable to avoid it. Amongst all the talk about its features and pricing and quality and awesomeness, I’m mostly interested in cool apps developed for it, because, if anything will push the Web 2.0 phenomenon to the mobile realm, iPhone is it.

So, here’s Hahlo, a slick (everything concerning the iPhone has to be ’slick’) interface for Twitter. If you have a Twitter account, all you have to do is sign up with your Twitter credentials to Hahlo, and it works.

Scared as I am to start Safari, fearing it will destroy my otherwise rock-stable computer (I’m not kidding, my experience with the first version of Safari was nothing short of abysmal), I tried it out and it looks really nice, enabling all your basic Twitter features, some filters, and it also has some buttons that do nothing to me - but, then again, I don’t have an iPhone to really test it. It does have a weird glitch, though: if you login with wrong credentials, instead of returning an error of some sort, it acts as if you are legitimately logged in, but (unsurprisingly) shows no messages.

Hahlo

Oh, and while we’re on the topic of iPhone, here’s an interesting rumor that says that iPhone in Europe will have 3G, and it will be locked in to either Vodafone or T-Mobile. Since my opinion is that iPhone would be a huge flop in Europe if it…

a) didn’t have UMTS/HSDPA
b) had a lousy batter time
c) were locked to one operator

…it seems that Apple has wisened up and fixed all three problems (although I’d prefer to see iPhone in free sale, not tied to a contract with an operator). Now if iPods in general weren’t locked into iTunes, I might even consider buying one!

WebScriptLab - Turning Ideas into Script

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KillerStartups

at June 29, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 0 Comments

Need an Ajax loading gif, favicons, or a cool sounding web 2.0 name? If you answered yes to any of those, then head on over to WebScriptLab. This site is simple yet utterly practical. The first tool out of the lab is a gif generator; if you haven’t already got a little round icon to indicate your Ajax is loading you can create one; simply pick an indicator type, background color, foreground color, speed, and presto, you’ve got yourself a handy yet elegant loading icon.

To create favorites icons upload a picture (150KB max.), convert it to the 16×16 Favicon standard and hit generate. The same goes for your web domain, just click generate and see what’s available. WebScriptLab may not have tons to offer, but what they’ve got so far is pretty useful.

In their own words:
“Create your own ajax loading gif easily” “Create a favorites icon for
your site” “Create your own web 2.0 domain easily” Find out why it
might be a killer and vote for this startup at KillerStartups.com.

MySpace TV is Completely The Same as YouTube

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Stan Schroeder

at June 28, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 3 Comments

I haven’t expected a great deal of innovation from MySpace; I thought that MySpace TV is going to be a run of the mill video sharing site with a couple of MySpace-specific features.

Well, now the site is live, and as it turns out, it is just that, but it’s also completely the same as YouTube. By that I don’t mean that they stole the code or anything like that, but…just look at the damn thing. Below are screenshots of two services, for side by side comparison.

MySpace TV YouTube

As you can see, the layout is the same. The features…well, except for a couple of minor details (digg-style voring instead of YouTube’s stars), they’re also pretty much the same.

In some other situation I might think this as a bad idea, but in case of MySpace keeping with what works is probably the best road they can take, as it will be very easy for MySpacers to switch from one service to another.

Pownce - Kevin Rose’s IM Startup

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Stan Schroeder

at June 27, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 5 Comments

Pownce is an Adobe AIR (ex. Adobe Apollo) application from the workshop of Digg’s creator Kevin Rose which lets you group up with friends and send messages, files, links and events to them.

Hey, this is familiar. I know, it’s called instant messaging!

Pownce Unfortunately, since Pownce is currently invite-only beta, I can’t test it out to give a proper review, but from what I can gather on the official site, it does not offer anything significantly different from most IM clients today.

There is one great feature, and I’ve been banging my head against the wall (well, not very hard) about it for a long time now, wondering why IM clients don’t make it simpler: instead of being boxed into 1:1 communication (IM) or X:X (chat) or 1:X (Twitter), Pownce offers all of it in one package. Want to send a picture to your family, but not all your friends? Easy: select recepients and send away. Try to do the same thing in any IM client and you’ll see that it usually doesn’t work and/or takes quite a few steps.

As far as other features go, you get themes (big plus in my book, but not a necessary feature by any means), and if you upgrade to a pro account you get rid of the adds and you get to send much bigger files.

20 Web Services That Can Make You Money

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Stan Schroeder

at June 27, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and Features. 7 Comments

The following guest post has been written by Ali J from EverybodyGoTo.

Ah, making money online - the topic that resurfaces every now and then - unsurprisingly, since money is the world’s number one attention grabber. Well, most of the time what’s offered is either unrealistic or just some easy scam. We’ve sifted through the options and found 20 web services that probably won’t turn you into a millionaire overnight, but they all offer a good clean and honest way to make some extra dough.

Online Shops

Zazzle

Zazzle - Zazzle combines innovative manufacturing, a robust community, the largest online collection of customizable digital images and unmatched personalization tools to empower you to create apparel, posters, cards, stamps and more.

SpreadShirt - SpreadShirt lets you open a free shop and start selling your creations. Spreadshirt will take care of the rest from payment processing, production, and shipping to after-sales service. As a shop partner, you can earn commission on every order through your Spreadshop.

Zlio - Start your own online shop in 5 minutes. Choose your products and earn commissions on each sale!Without needing any programming skills, you can start and manage your own shop.

iLetYou - Movie and game buffs are going to love this. If you have a huge library of DVDs and video games that you don’t watch or play too much why not rent them out for money to people looking for them. iLetYou sets your own prices and rental terms.

FlyingCart - The financial commitments required to open a store are enough to scare away even some of the most motivated entrepreneurs. Flying Cart makes the store setup process as simple as they can, making it possible to begin generating credit card sales from a custom domain name within about an hour.

Publishing - Video, Photo etc…

Cruxy

Cruxy - Cruxy provides powerful marketing, monetization and performance tools for digital creators, whether filmmakers, musicians or artists of any kind. Artists can sell just about any type of media file at the price they choose.

Citizen Image - Do you have a good eye behind a lens? Always walking around with your camera and know when to click for a great picture. Then why not sell it. Citizen Image can help you sell your images online.

Revver - Revver was probably the first video sharing site to split revenue with its users. Some people make enough to just do this and nothing else in their lives.

Qoof - Usermercialsâ„¢ is a consumer software application that leverages the power of broadband video content to enable users to finally generate solid revenue from their partnerships with online retail affiliate programs. Make a video of a product, upload it, insert affiliate code, profit???

ImageKind - Imagekind represents a new kind of marketplace where prospective customers can be reached across the globe. The service is always free to use and the artists set their own retail prices. It is one of the most powerful new platform for selling fine art prints from digital files.

Website, Blog and Widgets

DME

Direct Media Exchange - Let’s be honest, advertising on your website isn’t making you as much money as it should and managing all of your ad networks isn’t as easy as you’d like. Direct Media Exchange is a simple solution for managing ad networks that allows publishers to make more money from their websites.

BlogLinkr - You select the categories that you want your readers to see, and instead of content-less sales pitches and discounted products, your readers will see links to blogs in the categories you’ve selected …and you’ll get paid for each click. Beta launching soon.

Tumri - Tumri combines offer intelligence and targeting to deliveraprecisely selected set of products and offers through an interactive ad unit that converts browsers into buyers. Publishers have a variety of choices from text-based to video ads to choose from.

PayPerWidget - Discover cool widgets and get paid for displaying them. Choose from the best widgets and offers.

WengoVisio - Wengovisio is a Free Flash-based widget that you can embed in your blog/webpage to allow readers to call you when youâ€™re online. You can also make money with their pay-per-call services.

RSS Money

Feedburner

Feedburner - If you can maintain a sizable feed count for a set period of time, the boys over at Feedoogle will invite over into their FAN network and put some ads in your feeds.

Pheedo - Pheedoâ€™s FeedPoweredâ„¢ advertising platform converts your RSS feeds into rich, dynamically updating advertising that engages your audience.

Miscellaneous

Zecco

Zecco - With 40 free trades per month on stock trades you can make some good money doing just that. Every trade above 40 costs $3.50. If you know what you’re doing with online stock trading this could help you maximize your online income.

ZotSpot - Google doesn’t pay you to use their search engine but ZotSpot will. The more you use it, and refer friends that use it, the more money you can make. They also encourage you to donate some, or all, of your earnings to charity - for that warm fuzzy feeling.

Flippid - Flippid matches people who want stuff with people who have stuff. Name your price, and let people sell it to you. Sellers can post their stuff in the sellers’ market for free and get lots of exposure on flippid.

MySpace Challenges YouTube With MySpace TV

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Stan Schroeder

at June 27, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 0 Comments

myspace

News Corp., the owner of MySpace, has decided it should stop sitting on its butt and start doing something with the enormous community that is MySpace. Online video is where it’s at, and MySpace will directly challenge YouTube and others with MySpace TV, which is basically a rebranded MySpace Videos service. NYTimes says the new service will launch thursday.

The questions that are immediately rising are this:

a) Will MySpace screw it up like they did with MySpace News (which was touted as a Digg killer and it didn’t amount to absolutely anything)?
b) Is MySpace’s admittedly huge community willing to build, or do they prefer to link, comment and embed stuff from other places?

In the case of a), although a screwup is always possible, MySpace will probably be able to get it right. After all, it’s not that complicated, hence there are hundreds of video sharing sites around, many of them quite successful. But, every detail they screw up will cost them dearly, and the recent MySpace News debacle reminds that they are, indeed, capable of completely screwing up on all major points - features, design, and concept.

On second point, it’s again a matter of smart integration; if they make it very easy to MySpacers to upload videos and embed them on their profiles then the MySpace community will soon create a worthy adversary to YouTube. If only a small fraction of MySpace visitors - say, 1% - decided to upload a video every month, it would still amount to 500.000 new monthly videos. Try creating that kind of momentum with a new site, and you’ll see that it’s not that easy.

Another point worth mentioning is that, according to NYTimes, MySpace plans to focus on professional content, and not on sharing (this means more rap videos and less videos of your hamster dancing). This is all nice and dandy, but they need to tap into the need of MySpacers to share their own amateur videos, because that’s what most of them want.

Internet Radio Dies Today

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at June 25, 2007 in Web and News. 7 Comments

Today is the day when most of Internet’s radio station go silent. If you’re an avid net radio listener like me, you already noticed, because your station either died mid-program or got interrupted by a message saying, basically, the RIAA is killing us.

Instead of a flat fee, Internet radios (even non-commercial ones, which is most of them) will have to pay a price per performance per listener, at a rate that will, simply put, force many of them to close down. Now the hour when this will start being enforced - July 15 - is drawing near, and the broadcasters are trying to draw attention to the fact that they simply cannot pay these new rates.

In an interview I’m listening to right now, one broadcaster (Accuradio) gives a practical example of what’s happening. He has a small webcast operation, and he manages to earn about $4000 yearly in advertising. He was paying around 12% of his revenue to the RIAA. With the new rates, since he has to pay a fee per song per listener, he’ll have to pay around $6000 to the RIAA, which is more than his total revenue. So, he either needs to push to triple his advertising revenue to make even, or he has to go bankrupt.

Similar sentiments, albeit on a larger scale, come from Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora. With the new rates, they need to invest very heavily into changing their advertising models (they’re not profitable at the moment even under the old rates), and if they’re lucky, they might start being profitable in a year or two. He also mentions that the satellite radio and terrestrial radio don’t pay this rate, which means that Internet radio is getting the worst deal.

Let me add a personal sentiment here. My guess is that because this is the Internet, head honchos at RIAA and others who are making this decision think that it’s some sort of a downloading/piracy haven, where kids save the entire daily streams and repackage and distribute them, or something similar. Well, it does not happen. Although I personally have the technical knowledge to save any audio stream to my hard disk, actually doing that is the last thing on my mind. I - and everyone else - tune into net radio just like terrestrial radio: I turn it on and I listen to it. There’s not a trace of piracy here; those who want to pirate music want entire albums, not a nondescript stream of arbitrarily chosen music.

I can easily imagine a situation where people who are making these decision are scared of the Internet - just like they’re scared of everything they don’t know anything about - and that’s why they’re trying to prevent a ‘problem’ that doesn’t even exist. And, by doing that, they’re ruining an entire small industry, and pissing off millions of listeners worldwide.

What can you do? Go join the fight at SaveNetRadio.

Twittergram - Twitter Meets Podcasts

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Stan Schroeder

at June 25, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 0 Comments

Twittergram is a cool idea turned to practice by Dave Winer, who wanted to somehow connect Twitter’s conventional mini-blogging form with podcasts. Thus, he created Twittergram, which enables you to create a simple audio file (not bigger than 200k) and link to it from Twitter.

As someone who doesn’t use any sort of voice messaging whatsoever (not even the phone secretary), I’m not going to be an early adopter on this one. But, if you like the idea, head over to Dave’s blog and check it out. It’s all in a very crude brainstorming stage right now, but Dave promises to turn it into a usable service soon.

[Via PronetAdvertising]

Sync Your Calendars With Plaxo 3.0

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at June 25, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 2 Comments

Plaxo

The latest version of Plaxo enables you to sync most of your online and offline calendars as well as your mobile phone. It supports Google Calendar, Outlook, Yahoo Calendar, Vista Mail, AOL, Thunderbird, and Mac OS X calendar.

The syncing works seamlessly; e.i., once you updated one of your calendars, all others will be updated. This is great news for folks like me, who have completely different calendar/contact habits at home and at work; while at home I use only Gmail, at work I’ve used Thunderbird for a while (well, I use The Bat! on both locations simply because it’s by far the best desktop e-mail client available, but it’s not supported by Plaxo).

See the video presentation here.

Weekend Fun: 15 Tower Defense Games

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Stan Schroeder

at June 22, 2007 in Web and News. 14 Comments

The news just hit me that the wildly popular Desktop Tower Defense game, a free Flash affair in which you need to use wit and tactics, positioning your canons to stop the enemies from passing through the battlefield, has been updated to version 1.5. The new version features several new weapons (most of which seem quite useless), new modes and slightly altered graphics.

DTD

The game is so addictive that I’m actually scared of trying it out, concerned that I might still be awake 6 hours from now, thinking to myself “just one more try” while the sun slowly rises outside and birds happily chirp with the coming of a new day.

But, this didn’t stop me from checking out all the other similar games, some of which have also been updated since the last time I’ve seen them, and I was pleased to find some new, advanced versions. So, besides the most popular Desktop Tower Defense, here are 9 more:

Onslaught 2 - one of the best DTD-style games out there, with a variety of maps; it has recently been updated to version 2. Compared to DTD, it seems easy at first, but it gets much, much tougher later.

Vector Tower Defense - futuristic version of DTD; some may like the vector graphics, I’m not too fond of it.

Vector

VR Defender Y3K - you’ll have to endure slow loading time and shoddy graphics for this one, but it can be quite fun once you get the hang of it.

AntBuster - ignore the insanely annoying banner and click on “Play this game”. The main difference here is the fact that you’re killing ants (which move in chaotic patterns) instead of your run-of-the-mill robots.

Flash Element TD - Warcraft take on the genre (actually, some claim the genre is derived from a Warcraft map, while others hold the opinion that it comes from much older games), also introduces research which enables you to buy better weapons.

Flash Element

Master of defense - a desktop game with 3D graphics resembling Warcraft; unfortunately, the full version will set you back 20 bucks.

Starcraft Flash Action 3 - although I have to appreciate the effort put into this CPU intensive version, I like the simpler versions better. Starcraft fans will feel at home with this one, though.

Starcraft

Immortal Defense - a commercial desktop game (free demo is available) with a very unique look and feel. The vector graphics can feel quite odd until you get used to it.

Flash Circle TD - a medieval take on the genre actually feels very fresh. The choice of weaponry is limited, but the novelty is in the way the game is played; here, you’re not protecting the sides of the battlefield; you’re trying to kill as many mobs (some call them creeps; coming from a MUD background, I prefer to call mindless enemies mobs - short of mobiles) and prevent them from infesting your screen completely.

Flash Circle

Tower Defence - a very simple take on a TD game; some may enjoy it precisely because it’s simple.

Turret Tyranny - futuristic TD-style game with very tiny graphics and complex maps.

Turret

Picnic Panic - a slightly weird (a fairy is present in the game, and the enemies look like dancing cockroaches) version of the game; playable, but it’s not my cup of tea.

Turret Defense - this one won’t win any prizes for an original name, but it has an (almost) cool intro and completely unnecessary mission debriefing. The concept is quite original: instead of killing non-descript mobs or bots, you’re destroying an (equally nondescript) enemy convoy.

Turret Defense

Tower Defense - another desktop game with a very unoriginal name, but we can forgive the creators since this one has been around for at least a year. It features lots of versatile weaponry and graphics that really could be better.

Howto: Automatically Expand Digg Comments

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at June 21, 2007 in Tips, Web, Web 2.0 and News. 0 Comments

The new Digg comment system we wrote a couple of days ago is finally live. Out of two possibilities, both of which were at some point working at the site, Digg chose the less popular one: all replies to comments are hidden by default. What’s worse, opening them seems to be quite a slow affair.

Well, many Digg users already find a simple cure for this (look at this thread) - simply add “/all” to the end of any Digg story address and all the comments will be expanded.

Example: instead of “http://digg.com/tech_news/New_Digg_Comments_System_Live” try “http://digg.com/tech_news/New_Digg_Comments_System_Live/all”

It’s simple to write a Greasemonkey script to do this automatically, and, of course, someone already did it. So, if you have Greasemonkey, head on over to Userscripts.org and install this nifty script. Voila: all the comment threads are now automatically expanded.

Netvibes Reaches 500 Universes

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at June 21, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 5 Comments

Netvibes, one of my favorite personalized portals, has announced they now have over 500 Netvibes Universes available. A Netvibes Universe is a customized, public personalized portal where you can find aggregated info on a certain subject. This customization includes an original header image and wallpaper, as well as many other details which cannot be changed on standard Netvibes pages.

For the time being, content creators are working with the Netvibes team to create Universes; but this feature should soon be available to everyone.

One of the 500 Netvibes Universes is our own FranticIndustries universe, where you can find a collection of RSS streams related to this site and its author. Feel free to check it out and tell us what you think.

franticindustries universe