Yeah, many web startups get a lot of attention with initial coverage, and then fall into oblivion after a couple months. But, it ain’t over till it’s over, right?

Still, the folks over at TechCrunch have the habit of taking some random company they don’t particularly like and pronounce it dead, even when there’s no other indication (except an Alexa graph, and we all know how reliable those are) that the company is actually doing bad. Case in point: Pownce.

I’ve invented a new word for this practice: deadpoolbaiting! So, which company should we deadpoolbait next? I’m open to suggestions. Please form an orderly line with your declining Alexa graphs.

I’ve been following online photo editors since they first appeared. I’ve even created an in-depth review of 6 most promising such products. After that, many new products appeared - I reckon there’s over 15 free online photo editors out there. And at least 5 of them have lots of features, good usability and speed - in short, they’re all around solid products.

But I will never use any of them in my daily work.

It’s simple: they lack one feature that might seem too abstract or too complex or not necessary to the developers, but it’s essential to me (and, I guess, thousands of other users): crop & resize at the same time. You know, it’s that thing in Photoshop where you set your crop area to some predefined size, and whichever portion of the image you select with the crop tool, it will get cropped and resized (up or down) to the exact size you’ve selected in the toolbar. I need this feature because I work for the web; on most web sites, you have some predefined image size that you use, and you want to fit as much visual information in it as possible. I reckon most online journalist can’t do without this feature; if they don’t use it, they should; it’s a life saver.

The reason why I remembered this is because I’ve just found about yet another online photo editor, perhaps the most full-featured of them all, called Cellsea. The first thing I tried to do, of course, is crop a portion of the image to a predefined size. And, of course, it doesn’t work. It crops, but it doesn’t resize.

Once again, no crop&resize.

So, all in all, I’ve tried over a dozen free online photo editors, and should they all amount to nothing in the end, I will consider it to be due to the lack of this one simple feature. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks this way. Or, maybe all those developers that created all these photo editors were all wrong to omit this one feature. It happens sometimes, you know.

Once again, it’s back to Photoshop for me.

Sometime in 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term weblog, which was a collection of links to various stuff on the web that he somehow found interesting. Now, he gives to Wired 10 tips he thinks all bloggers should know.

Here’s the first one.

“A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)”

Erm, this is 2008. and we’re not doing it like that anymore, Jorn. Not that there’s anything wrong with a linkblog, but blogs are something else. Sometimes, when you coin a term, it takes a meaning of its own over the years.

Needless to say, all his other points are completely irrelevant to bloggers, but are quite cool if you have a linkblog.

I guess I’ve been out of the loop lately, or I’m simply getting old, but I had no idea that the Facebook situation has gotten so bad.

What you see on the left side of this post is taken from my girlfriend’s actual profile. Now, it may not look as ugly as your standard MySpace profile, but content-wise it’s probably much worse. I mean, hot damn, there must be a hundred applications in there (this is just a fraction of it, you should see the full profile)!

Being my old stubborn self I’ve refused most of those zombie/vampire/sandwich/etc useless apps and thus my profile still looks quite clean. But, your average Facebook user will take anything thrown at him/her. Thus, my girlfriend can use her Facebook profile to learn how sexy she is, how sexy Santa Claus is; she can have her name analyzed, she can send and receive gifts, food and other shenanigans, she has a graveyard, she can hug, poke, kick, bump, kiss, greet, twist and snowball fight her friends…and absolutely none of this is in any way useful.

Luckily for us, in Facebook you don’t see most of this unless you yourself are subscribed to it. But still, my hopes that somehow Facebook will be a better, more serious social network than MySpace have vanished the second I saw that profile. You may laugh at MySpace’s ugliness, Facebookers, but your own social network ain’t much better. In fact, my girlfriend has mostly switched to MySpace because “it makes more sense.” Go figure.

The question remains: is there such a thing as a useful social network? I’m looking at you, LinkedIn. If you guys and girls reading this, please don’t let your upcoming API turn LinkedIn into something like this, ok?

All this said, has someone tried subscribing to all possible applications on Facebook just to see what’ll happen? If anyone has such aspirations (and the required patience), I’d like to know.

Before I go on topic, there’s this little news nugget which says that Pownce is pitching some VC firms and hopefully they’ll secure some funding soon.

Now, about Pownce and Twitter. The thing is, in my eyes, Pownce is Twitter done better. Replies are better organized; the ability to send and embed links, images and videos is great, as is the ability to organize your friends into groups. I’m not saying that Twitter is bad; I’m saying that Pownce upped the ante and improved on Twiter’s concept, while Twitter did relatively little to respond.

But, don’t take my word for it. Here’s what some Pownce users responded when I asked them about Pownce’s features which make it better than Twitter:

- more features
- looks better
- has been more reliable
- lack of character limit
- less clutter
- better friend management
- better when you actually expect a response

On the other side of the equasion, these same folks seem to prefer Twitter for:

- quick little updates on professional/personal things
- it’s like thinking out loud
- full API
- mobile Twittering
- more people are using it

So, it seems that people see these two applications as two very different things, although they’re very similar in nature. In a way, Twitter relates to Pownce like iPod Shuffle relates to iPod - its simplicity might be an advantage to some, while others will jump on iPod’s features and never look back. What do you think?

There’s been an interesting debate over whether, in a recent court case, RIAA is now finally (they’ve been borderline on this issue for quite some time now) saying that merely converting music from a CD you legally own to MP3s on your hard disk is illegal.

The important thing (as I’ve briefly commented over at RWW) to note here is, no matter how you stand on the issue, while we’re debating the finer points of some legal paper, the RIAA is winning by confusing us all. They’re constantly pushing the limits of what is legal in the world of music sharing and blurring them at the same time, systematically creating a world in which absolutely no kind of sharing is ever legal.

The problem is that the internet is not only about sharing. It IS sharing. I should be able to rip my music from a CD, convert it to any format I like, put it in any folder I want, share it with whomever I like, using software of my choosing. They’re the ones who need to figure out how to sell me their stuff despite all the above, without messing with the way I use my computer and the internet.

Now, if we even have to debate whether copying CDs I legally own to my hard drive is legal or illegal, then they’ve won. It’s standard Orwellian tactics: take some utterly impossible notion and convince the people it’s the truth. Your “common sense” line of defense is broken, and they can then make some other stupid idea illegal much more easily - for example the one that says you can’t share music with other people. No one in their right mind would ever condemn you for copying a tape cassette or creating a mix tape and giving it out back in the day; now, they’re suing you for doing the same thing.

Oh, and if you’re thinking about writing a comment about how musicians will vanish from the face of the planet if we all keep on sharing files, then they’ve got to you, too.

AGLOCO was a stupid idea. You get paid to surf the web, and you get money for everyone who signs up with you as referral. Sure. Money gets created out of thin air, and everyone gets rich (especially the folks who got there early)? Well, according to John Chow, one of their biggest supporters, now they’re dead, and I won’t shed any tears over it.

In any case, I’m sorry for the people who had spent time pitching AGLOCO to their friends. For future reference, note the difference between affiliate marketing and a pyramid scheme (source: Wikipedia): the first is “a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts” while the latter is ” a non-sustainable business model that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, usually without any product or service being delivered” The key word here? Product.

Read a solid analysis of AGLOCO here.

Twitter is now banned in the United Arab Emirates because its content is “incosistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates“. I guess the fact that Twitter has no content per se doesn’t play a big part here; they’ve basically banned a tool for communication. Twitter now joins the army of other sites banned by the Emirates, most notably Flickr and Facebook.

Poor Technorati. They’ve had so many changes of strategy and redesigns in the last year or two that it’s hard to determine what they really want, and - a much bigger problem for the still huge blog tracker - people are likely to stop caring soon.

A clear example of the mess all these changes of focus have created is Technorati WTF, a relatively recent subsection of the site which features a Digg-like voting system on stories submitted by Technorati members. I’ve explained in detail why I think that WTF is flawed (although not necessarily a bad idea) before.

The interesting thing is that now, in the new design, this feature is nowhere to be seen. It still exists, here, it’s just not linked to anywhere on the front page of Technorati. In fact, if you don’t know the address, I don’t think it’s possible to reach it from anywhere on Technorati (correct me if I’m wrong on this one).

It’s visible in the content, too, as WTF is quite a sad sight at this moment. Several spammy stories, all over one month old, are all that WTF has to show - even in the “Recent” section. It’s probably just a matter of time before WTF gets shut down.

I still think that WTF is not such a bad idea; however, instead of stories, actual blog articles should automatically show up there, with users being able to vote them up or down. This would create a Digg-like list of recent interesting blog articles which, with a little help of crowd wisdom, might actually be relevant, instead of the seemingly arbitrary mish-mash of stories that the front page currently displays.

As much as I’m happy that Digg will get this long sought feature, the image section, I must grudgingly notice that Digg has become one of those companies that are a) extremely slow on the updates and b) when they do update, it’s an implementation of some feature that the community has wanted for months, if not years.

Case in point: besides the image section, tonight’s update (not yet live at the time of this writing) will include several new categories. For example, currently awkwardly placed Offbeat subcategory will become a category, and a whole new category called Lifestyle, containing subcategories like Autos, Food & Drink, Travel and the like, will be added to the site. Those of you who are following FranticIndustries from the very beginning know that I’ve asked for better categorization in one of the first posts on this site, about one year ago. Ah well, better late than never.

Here’s the short scoop on two new interesting Digg-related tools.

One is an unofficial recommendation engine for Digg called Digg Filter. It’s really simple: enter your username and you will get a bunch of stories that are “recommended” for you. I’m not a big fan of automated recommendation engines but this seems to be a much-sought feature, and one that Digg plans to implement soon, so Digg Filter can be seen as a “preview” of this upcoming option. Read Muhammad Saleem’s interview with the author over at RWW.

The other tool I’ve dug up in Digg’s upcoming stories is called Digg Explorer, and it offers a neat visual representation of certain Digg statistics: often used words, popular topics and subtopics, most active dates, etc. It’s all based on the last 500 front paged Digg stories, so don’t expect data from a year ago, but it’s still a great reference, with the added bonus of looking really nice. Read my coverage at Mashable, too.

Recently there were news about The Pirate Bay adding some cool Web 2.0-ish elements to their site; one of these included Last.FM streams for some of the artists.

Many of the commenters on that news item were worried about what CBS might think about it. For example, one of them, nicknamed Al Iguana, had said:

“CBS (or whoever owns LastFM now) are going to love that…lol. The price you pay for open data.”

Well, as it turns out, CBS has nothing against The Pirate Bay using their API. They have no control over who uses its API, and stopping Pirate Bay from using it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the API, they said.

While I don’t usually expect common sense from bigcos, this time I must applaud CBS for being reasonable. Yarr for Pirate Bay!