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BubbleShare – Best Photo Service Yet?

Michael Arrington

Toronto-based online photo sharing is just wonderful, and ridiculously easy to use. Their interface team deserves a gold star or something, because I don’t think I’ve ever used a site’s full functionality without consulting a single FAQ or other instruction. BubbleShare allows users to upload photos without registration (this isn’t really a trick either – later registration is absolutely bare bones). There is a tour linked from the home page, but you really don’t need it – just start uploading photos and you’ll get how it works (they use the Flash 8 upload feature for photo sharing). Things are album based. The free service allows users to create albums of up to 100 photos each, with a permanent URL for sharing. Photos can be dragged and dropped to change the order, resized and a voice comment can be added. Comments are available for visitors as well as an RSS feed. Another key BubbleShare feature that many photo sites don’t have is a multi-uploader tool that allows user to upload many photos at once. The only thing that BubbleShare is missing is photo tagging and tag search. BubbleShare is now my Canadian web 2.0 company. :-) .

V4S – Voicemail for Skype

Michael Arrington

I read about Orb’s on and . V4S is a good, free tool for sending voicemails to Skype and Outlook contacts. V4S joins a whole bunch of products attacking the same or similar market (sending voicemails over the web): , , , and even the humble .

Three Cheers For Bloglines

Michael Arrington

I have to admit, I was hoping for the best but feared the worst as Bloglines moved over to a new data center last night. Their have enraged me in the past, although their stellar customer service almost completely made up for it (emails are returned instantaneously). Everything seems to be working very well. Bloglines is speedy and responsive. Let’s hope it stays that way as the blogosphere continues to explode. The last three posts to the really tell the story of the stress they’ve been going through over the last few months. Reprinted below (read from the bottom up): Bloglines has completed the relocation to our new data center. Don’t panic if some subscriptions haven’t started updating with new items yet. Our machines will be catching up with the activity of the blogosphere for the next few hours. We know a lot of you are getting the shakes so we didn’t want to keep you from your Bloglines any longer than necessary. There is also a known issue with some subscriptions showing incorrect unread counts. However, your unread items have not been lost. Clicking on the subscription will display all the unread articles. We are working to fix this. We’ll follow up with a more detailed post when we’re more settled in. Thanks again for your patience and support during this outage. – The Bloglines Team Mon, 19 Dec 2005 20:30:00 PST Bloglines will have a planned outage on Monday, December 19, 2005 in order to relocate to a new data center. Here’s our planned schedule for tomorrow: * 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC): Your subscriptions will stop updating with new items. * 4:00pm PDT (12:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be completely offline. During this time you will not be able to access your account. * 8:00pm PDT (4:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be back online by this time. New articles posted during the outage will appear in your account. We look forward to vastly improved hardware capacity and tons of elbow room for growth. Thank you for your patience during this outage. – The Bloglines Team Sun, 18 Dec 2005 15:50:00 PST We’re not going to beat around the bush about this. Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately. Why? In short, Bloglines has been busting at the seams like the Incredible Hulk. All of us here at Bloglines have been foregoing sleep and social lives over the past several months to keep Bloglines running and preparing for our move to a new access center (with bigger britches and a very elastic waistline). So hang tight because there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The move will happen soon; we’ll keep you posted. – The Bloglines Team Wed, 15 Dec 2005 7:00:00 PST

Edge Of Network Reviews – KritX

Michael Arrington

is very raw, but they are on to something big – aggregation of reviews from blogs (the edge of the network). I wrote in a (no. 9) that I’d like to see someting like this be built. Don’t look so much at the current execution of Kritx and judge them too quickly – think about the idea that they are trying to exploit. There are millions of passionate user reviews on blogs today of everything you can think of – movies, music, books, resaurants, etc. Just do a technorati search for “review” and you are looking for. Of course, initiatives to better organize blog data, like and , will make this data even easier to index and present to users. kritX is combinging blog reviews and microformats with a vertical search engine to present these edge reviews to users. It has a long way to go. Authors must use microformats and tell kritX that they want their posts included (neither of these things are really necessary). But it is a good idea that can grow into something incredible. All the data is just sitting out there on the open internet, ready to be harvested. See also , who do something similar (although they do not require microformats, they do require author registration at the site). The plethora of ads on Blogcritics do get in the way of the user experience, though.

Canadians Sure Do Love Beer

Michael Arrington

This mashup certainly caught my eye – . Unlike California, where you can buy alcohol just about anywhere until 2 am, parts of Canada have very restrictive alcohol laws – its hard to find a place to buy it, and the hours of operation are erratic. I know this because I lived in Ottawa a couple of years ago. I remember the fascist-like and it’s near-overwhelming control over alcohol in Ontario, Canada. :-) Well, Janis Mussat is helping. She’s created a mashup of Google maps and local alcohol outlet hours of operation. If you live in Ontario, this just may become your home page.

Riya Goes it Alone

Michael Arrington

Riya, the celebrated that has allowed in a few lucky alpha testers over the last few months, was the subject of significant a few weeks ago. “Sources” put the price in the $30 million range, although the company was understandably silent, even during their a few days later. Tonight, Founder and CEO Munjal Shah around Riya on his blog, stating flatly that Riya continues as an independent company: For the past few months, there have been many speculations about our future as an independent company. For various legal reasons I couldn’t and still can’t directly comment on these. However, at this time, Riya continues as an independent team fully focused on making our photo search dream a reality. just wrote about this as well, admitting that Microsoft took a look at Riya (passing on the price), and expressing his hope that they’ll take another look now that the Google deal has fallen through. Either way, I’m just looking forward to the product finally shipping. Munjal says that will be at Demo in February. And as an interesting side discussion, , a Riya investor (and a friend of mine) takes us all down a notch (TechCrunch is specifically mentioned) saying “Every report was factually incorrect at the time it was printed. I did not see one accurate characterization of any discussions Riya.com may or may not have had.” Ouch. But this can’t be entirely correct – Robert has confirmed in his blog that Microsoft met with Riya and passed on the deal. So at the very least, acquisition discussions were taking place.

Yep, One More Ajax Desktop – Pageflakes

Michael Arrington

I recently that the Ajax desktop space was getting crazy-crowded. That was before Google released their and launched. And now we have a developer release of a new ajax desktop called (available only in IE). Pageflakes has a number of features – rss reading, email checking, note taking, searching, etc. It also has a developer API to allow third party module-creation. Given that Microsoft and Google have this feature, it is a must have to even get in the game. Pageflakes says it is easier to develop modules for their site than for Microst Live or Google – Developers can use MS Visual Studio and they support ASP.NET and Atlas (modules can also be build using PJP or JSP). Of course, overcoming the user loyalty of (now a significant source of TechCrunch daily traffic) and the network power of Microsoft and Google will be very difficult. My current count of ajax/flash desktops is nine: Who am I missing? Who’s lucky number 10? At this point I’m just writing about these for the fun of it. :-)

Diigo – Enough Evolution?

Michael Arrington

, which stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff”, is a social bookmarking site that allows users to highlight multiple content areas, including pictures, tag the page, and bookmark it. Users can also add sticky notes to a highlighted text area. It has other good features as well – see the for a good overview. Many of the bookmarking sites are starting to blur together for me. I like Diigo and the founders are politely efficient in getting the word out. The company has also executed well and released a polished product. But at the end of the day I’m not sure how many social bookmarking sites can make the cut. I will say this, though. I like the idea of public and private “sticky” notes on a website ( promises this, and I saw a really great demo two months ago, but it hasn’t launched yet). And I also like the ability to highlight multiple areas of a website in my bookmarks ( does a great job of this). But, as you can see, for just about every feature, there are multiple companies already attacking the space with vigor. Good luck to all. It’s going to be a long, hard fight. With perhaps as much as a at the end of the day.

Gaming Digg

Michael Arrington

Getting on to the home page of Digg ( ) sends a site a lot of traffic, and some folks will do just about anything for traffic. I know a lot of people who claim to have multiple Digg accounts to give their posts a lift, but it appears that the practice has become more…professional recently. has done some research on the issue and posts on his findings. Bottom line – at least for now, gaming Digg is exceptionally easy.

LibriVox Offers Free Audio Book Downloads

Michael Arrington

Hugh McGuire’s goal is to make all public domain (expired copyright) books available free online in audio format. He’s created to reach that goal, and it is a terrific open source, public domain project. suggest public domain books and record chapters. Finished books are and podcasted LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project. I think this is a terrific project, and the content will be very welcome on my long drive back to the bay area this week from Seattle. I also plan to volunteer and read chapters (I promise not to sneak in plugs for TechCrunch either). Check out examples such as Jack London’s and Charles Dickens’ . has an interview with the founder. Thanks for the tip .

TechCrunch Turns 6 Months Old Today

Michael Arrington

TechCrunch turned six months old today – my first post was on June 11, 2005. It’s more fun than ever. Thank you to everyone who reads my blog. Knowing people are out there keeps me going. I got a nice half birthday present from Technorati. :-)

Dave Winer's Newest Adventure

Michael Arrington

Dave Winer announced today that he’s built a new RSS aggregator, built on his OPML editor platform. He’s released it to the OPML community for early testing. . The aggregator will have advanced podcasting/videocasting support and will also include a “ ” feature. The idea around reading lists is to allow people to subscribe to other people’s list of recommended feeds (in OPML format), and have those lists update as feeds are added or removed. Seems simple, but no one does it now. The aggregator will be in the “river of news” format, as opposed to folder based like Bloglines. The reason? Dave likes it that way. I’ve argued with him over this issue but he assures me that he’s right. :-) Looks like may agree. This is a matter of personal choice, of course. I’m looking forward to testing this out and doing a full review.

Podtranscript to Transcribe Podcasts

Michael Arrington

I’ve received dozens of follow up emails to a post I wrote last month called . Today I saw another one, from Joe Mendoza, announcing the imminent launch of , a service which will transcribe podcasts for publishers. This was no. 8 on my list. Hi Michael, I read your blog entry titled “Companies I’d like to profile (but don’t exist)”. In point number 8 you mentioned podcast transcription. I read that almost jumped out of my skin, I mean, it was sheer co-incidence. Here, I just reserved a domain name www.podtranscript.com a week or two ago and was toying with the idea of launching a podcast transcription service, and almost out of the blue a mention of the concept is made in TechCrunch. I am offering podcast transcription service from www.podtranscript.com. Right now we are not offering a fee based service. Instead we are offering a sample service where our visitor can request a transcription for a 15 minutes podcast, for free. The paid service will be launched soon. I was thinking of hiring somebody to review and suggest a price for transcription, and I scrapped the idea after reading your blog :-). I went aheadand priced service at $10 for every 30 minutes of audio or video or both. My site is at http://www.podtranscript.com Thanks Joe Mendoza Joe is following my recommendation (which I pulled out of thin air) and will charge $10 per half hour of audio or video. A key issue will be turnaround time – I’d be willing to pay premium for very quick transcriptions. Podtranscript will join in a rush to see who will launch first with this business.

Magnatune's Answer to the Music Problem

Michael Arrington

, founded by John Buckman in 2003, is a music label with an associated website. Today was the first time I heard about Magnatune (thanks to ), but I agree entirely with their business philosophy. I really think this is the music business model of the future. There are two key business model issues to note that make Magnatune different. The first is that Magnatude allows buyers to download music completely free of DRM and in the format (WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC and AAC) and quality of their choice (very similar to grey market , but in this case with the artist’s express permission). As I’ve , I think this is the only way a label or artist can charge for music – no DRM and offering a choice of formats and quality. Albums sell for $5 and up (the buyer decides if he or she wants to pay more). Sales include downloadable cd art and inserts. CDs may also be purchased for delivery. The second business model difference is how Magnatune . They share a flat 50% of gross proceeds (before any costs) from music sales with artists. They also share 50% of merchandise sales profits, although they have not started selling merchandise yet. Magnatune doesn’t take on any artist that applies – only about 2.5% of those that apply are accepted according to an article by . Magnatune also gives the buyer the legal right to share the music with three other people, even allowing those people to download the music directly from Magnatune (a great viral marketing feature, by the way). Of course, without DRM, the music can be shared anyway, but giving people the right to do this is a nice touch. And if you lose your music, you can re-download it from Magnatune at no additional cost ( will love this). Yes, there are no high profile artists currently signed. But if Magnatune can get even a single big artist to move to them, they’ll be on the map permanently, and the artist will make a lot more money.

Meebo Confirms Sequoia Funding

Michael Arrington

Meebo the that they have received funding from Sequoia Capital on their blog. Congratulations to everyone involved. No real details yet, but I’m hearing that the pre-money valuation was $9 million, not $10 million as I originaly reported. I assume the investment was in the $3 – $4m range.

WordPress 2.0 – The Good and the Bad

Michael Arrington

We’ve switched TechCrunch over to . Not everyone is interested in the feature set of the WordPress blogging platform, so I’ll keep this brief. To see a good overview of the new features, see . A big change is the ability to create categories on the fly, from the post page, with Ajax. This was previously a multi step process. Since Technorati and other blog search engines view categories as synonyms to tags, this is a quick way for most users to quickly and easily tag their posts without adding additional code. Another big improvement is the enhanced “view post preview” function. This shows the post exactly as it will look on the blog, with all formatting and CSS that will be applied. This is a welcome feature. They’ve also added a wysiwyg rich text editor. I disabled this immediately, although many users will like it. Now for the bad. The new image uploader is a train wreck. Yes, they’ve moved it to the post page which removes a click. However, what took a couple of steps before now takes five or six because I format images in a very particular way which the uploader doesn’t support. It also has default settings, like thumbnails, that require extra clicks to get This needs to be fixed or I will literally go crazy. At the very least, just showing me the URL string for the uploaded image will get me back some of the functionality lost. The image URL folder is now reset every month as well, and so I can’t easily find old images, either. They didn’t think through this very well, or at all. Transition took a few days (yes, days) before comments and images were showing properly (thank you, , for doing this) The provides some help, but the depth of questions and obvious user frustration shows that many, including me, should have tested it out before transitioning our entire blog there.

Omnidrive – Online Storage Perfection

Michael Arrington

I’ve been testing ‘s very early beta product over the last few days. Omnidrive will be launching in January, 2006. I’ve spent hours with it (and previously posted ) – significantly more than I spend with most products. The reason? This is a product that I and millions of others really – a pure and functional online storage product with key web 2.0 features. Omnidrive is based in Australia, but is as good or better than anything else I’ve seen out of silicon valley recently. It has been in development for 12 months. Users have two ways to upload, view and interact with files. The first is a web interface that allows for fairly easy file uploading. Users have three main folder options to start – private, shared and public. By placing a file in the shared folder, other people you’ve allowed in can see and download the file. If placed in the public folder, everyone can access the file. Omnidrive is also releasing a toolbar to assist with the web interface. The second way to access files is via a download (they support PC and Mac now, pocket PC later) that creates a virtual Omnidrive drive. This is THE way to upload or download big batches of files at once. Drag in a multi-gigabyte folder and Omnidrive will work away at it in the background until its fully uploaded or downloaded. The other features, some of which are still being built, include: Pricing is a tough area for Omnidrive. They face storage and, more importantly, bandwidth costs that can be significant on a per user basis. In a post I back in November (when I first heard of Omnidrive), I wrote that these services needed to give some storage for free, and “lots” for cheap. Founder in a post that my pricing needs were crazy, but agreed that there needs to be a compelling price point to get mass user adoption. Their current pricing reflects this thinking. They will give a gig or two of storage for free, and sell 10 gb bundles above that for “not more than” $70 per year. That’s pricy, but way below the industry standard right now. And of course there will have to be bandwidth throttles. Since files can be public, outgoing bandwidth can be a massive cost for them. I’m saying this flat-out. Omnidrive is in a position to dominate a market with tremendous pent up demand. I’ve looked at a number of competing services and no one is doing anything close to what they are in functionality and usability. This service, or a white label version of it, should be built in to every new computer and operating system, and many web applications. With an appropriate API in and out, and rock-bottom pricing, Omnidrive can own a very large market niche. The cost problem is not trivial, and for a self funded startup taking an up front cost with the promise of long-term customer loyalty is difficult to say the least. But the opportunity is there. This company needs to get funded and start acquiring users, immediately.

Google Taunts Skype, Releases GTalk API

Michael Arrington

Google has just released a set of components called that allow third party applications to interact with . The components, which include some source code, are being released under a very liberal allowing for free incorporation into commercial and non-commercial software. We are releasing this source code as part of our ongoing commitment to promoting consumer choice and interoperability in Internet-based real-time-communications. The Google source code is made available under a Berkeley-style license, which means you are free to incorporate it into commercial and non-commercial software and distribute it. In addition to enabling interoperability with Google Talk, there are several general purpose components in the library such as the P2P stack which can be used to build a variety of communication and collaboration applications. We are eager to see the many innovative applications the community will build with this technology. Below is a summary of the individual components of the library. You can use any or all of these components. * base – Low-level portable utility functions. * p2p – The p2p stack, including base p2p functionality and client hooks into XMPP. * session – Phone call signaling. * third_party – Non-Google components required for some functionality. * xmllite – XML parser. * xmpp – XMPP engine. Google has done a great job with spurring Google Maps mashups – some people claim hundreds of thousands of third party applications. This code release is even more important and is a huge end around Skype. In fact, Google has basically put a gun to Skype’s head and demanded they now release their API as well. Skype allows integration with the Skype . What Google has done goes far beyond this, allowing integration with the Google Talk’s VOIP . Here’s an example of a potential mashup – putting google map location information in the same application as google talk, allowing mapping of everyone in the conversation ( does this). See local businesses and people and add them to the conversation.

Oodle to Add Events

Michael Arrington

Oodle a vertical search engine for classified ads, is set to add events as a category in the next week or so. Oodle’s current categories include For Sale, Cars, Housing, Jobs and Services. With events, they will have the ability to pair revenue-generating services such as ticket sales and related items with the classifieds. Oodle clearly needs to find new ways to generate excitement. Traffic is and they recently lost the feed from , an important source of classified ads. Oodle is all about decentralized content, a theme I constantly talk about, and I’m in their corner. I hope they find a way to make their model work.

Writely Is Kicking A**

Michael Arrington

( ) continues to in online ajax word products. Writely has had great features from day 1: import and export into Word format, embedded images, a wysiwyg editor, drag and drop functionality, sharing with others, and tagging of documents. They are also rolling out new features regularly and annoucing them on the . A few features that I’ve noticed recently: The ability to create PDFs directly from writely is a really useful tool that you cannot do with Word (unless you’ve separately purchased or have otherwise obtained the PDF software). Writely is no longer a toy – it is fast becoming a legitimate alternative to Word. Here’s what I’d like to see next – a quick rollout of other office applications, starting with Excel and Power Point. The rumor is that Writely is courting venture capital money now and is being very well received. Writely is also an obvious acquisition target – both for the product as well as the proven team.

Microsoft Wallop in User Trials

Michael Arrington

I’ve been hearing a bit about Microsoft’s project from users (apparently its at least two years old). Microsoft describes Wallop as a place to ” share photos, blog, and interact with your friends”. Ok, that pretty much doesn’t narrow it down much at all. The beta is closed and as I said above there isn’t a whole lot of descriptive information on the website. The Microsoft has a little more, and includes a couple of screen shots: In Wallop, you can share photos, blog, and interact with your friends. Wallop is a research project that explores how people share media and build conversations in the context of social networks. We are currently conducting a small, real world trial of Wallop with small friendship groups. Therefore, membership in Wallop http://mywallop.com is limited to study participants until the trial is over. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one. The other projects on the also look interesting.

Flock Says "Enough"

Michael Arrington

has gotten a lot of criticism lately. The reason for this particular round of naysaying is the launch of the impressive Firefox plugin that allows extremely easy blogging, from Firefox, for WordPress, MovableType or Blogger. Performancing is getting extremely good reviews from top bloggers like , and . But the attacks didn’t start with the release of Performancing. They go way back. Flock even has its own hate blog (flocksucks.wordpress.com) (although this one substitutes common cruelty for actual insight and humor). My guess is Flock is suffering from a bit of backlash over its early hype. And my further guess is that Flock, backed by an impressive group of founders and investors, has a few massive tricks up its sleeve that will be announced (or leak out) sometime soon. Until now Flock has done little to fuel all the hype, and have likewise refrained from responding to the criticism. Tonight, however, Flock’s , supported by CEO , takes issue with some of the bashing. I like this post, and not just because Chris at one point says “jack-in-the-box assclown” or calls web surfing with Firefox extensions “Firefox and Duct tape”. Chris gives a passionate, if not entirely fact laden, speach on what the hell they are trying to accomplish over at Flock. But no, see, that’s where Flock comes in. Or I don’t care, don’t call it Flock. Whatever you want, but that’s where the thing we’re building comes in. That’s why we exist, that’s why we matter, that’s what the point is. Yeah, Firefox and Duct tape, it’ll help. Sure sure. It’ll get you some of the way there. But hell, when I’m talking to someone, engaged in a conversation that threatens my very existence, or that threatens to change the way I flip my omelettes, man, I do not want my mouth to fall off at the jaw because it wasn’t tested, wasn’t built right, didn’t have a million beedy eyes boring down on it while it was being fastened to my head, making sure the stupid thing would function in the real world without needing pliers or a tireiron to get it to work right. My last post on Flock, covering its beta launch, . Disclaimer: I like Flock and the Flock employees. I get excited about big ideas. And I believe Flock can be a big idea.

Indeed's Launches IM Interface

Michael Arrington

Check this out: add “IndeedJobs” as a friend on Google Talk and say “hello”. You’ll get a nice (and fast) interface to the job search engine. Nice tool.

GoodStorm's Feel Good Capitalism

Michael Arrington

Maybe it’s because it’s the holiday season, but it seems impossible to me not to like San Francisco-based . It’s a competitor to Kleiner-backed , and CafePress – basically they let you set up shop and sell items with your logo on it. As with all of these services, they do all the hard work – producing and shipping the item, and collecting the money. All the seller has to do is market the shop, set prices and collect their share of the money. GoodStorm was founded by Yobie Benjamin and August Capital’s in October and on December 14, 2005 (there are good pictures of the team at that link as well). Their business model is designed to cater specifically to nonprofits. They keep only 30% of the profits on a sale (giving the rest to the seller), and also donate a portion of profits to charity. Like I said, it’s hard not to like this company. Currently they are working with sellers one-one-one, but will eventually launch a self service store creator. The company is built on the open source content management system. GoodStorm says they will be donating chunks of code back to the project as well. wrote about Goodstorm earlier this week and has additional information.

Oodle Does add Events/Tickets Category

Michael Arrington

I last week – and now has officially added events and tickets as a category. This seem to be primarily a combination of and tickets from a . There’s lots on money in this space from affiliate fees, so it’s a smart move.

The Hyperwords Plugin

Michael Arrington

I generally don’t write about Firefox plugins, but is one that’s gotten my attention. Like says, it’s a must-have product to aid the browsing experience. And I see a business model here, too. Hyperwords gives users a number of choices whenever a piece of text is selected. The options simply pop up – right click functionality remains unchanged. Options include searching various engines, looking up text in wikipedia and dictionary.com, emailing text, searching on Google Maps, translation, and searching on Amazon and other commerce sites. The search and commerce traffic will generate revenue (my guess is a dollar or so per year per active user). The translation service is incredibly useful. If you’d like to beta test Hyperwords, email beta@gethyperwords.com.

Gravee Takes a New Approach to Search

Michael Arrington

soft launched tonight. It has an interesting business model. In addition to pulling in search results from Google, MSN and Yahoo (Alexa coming soon), Gravee also allows publishers to claim their site and, theoretically, get a piece of Gravee’s revenue. Here’s : With Gravee’s AdShare program, when a user clicks an ad on Gravee, up to 70% of the ad revenue generated as a result is divided between the 10 sites included in the natural search results on the page (i.e. 70%/10 = 7% of ad revenue to each Web site on the page – for every ad that is clicked). Register your site now to start collecting your share of Gravee’s ad revenue. Gravee also shares up to 35% of revenue with publisers that join their affiliate program and place their search box on their site. This will be an interesting way of driving traffic to their site. Site claiming is done via whois information – meaning you must be in control of your domain name to claim the blog. Another way for them to accomplish this would be to ask the site owner to put a piece of code on her/his site, which I imagine they will add at some point.

Is FeedBurner Pushing the Envelope on Trust?

Michael Arrington

I’m a big fan of and write about them often. I’m also a “pro” subscriber now and pay the $5/month for that service, which I think is more than fair given how much value they add. I like having the insight into RSS analytics, and FeedBurner has never broken on me. I also consider many of the Feedburner guys friends. Even , the CEO, has helped me personally with some issues in the past. In short, I support Feedburner. Yesterday Feeburner some new features on the RSS Feed landing page that are designed to make the user experience a step better than before. The functionality includes storing user preferences for RSS subscriptions, a cleaner layout, and a preview feature for podcasts and videocasts. All good stuff. writes about this on his blog as well in glowing terms, and in general I agree with him – these are nice features. In looking at the new I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before. An advertisement. It’s just a single line of text – “Download a Free Trial of FeedDemon 1.5”, with a link that begins a download of FeedDemon. I don’t know if it was there before or if this is a recent addition, but I don’t like it. This page should be all about getting new subscribers to the publisher’s feed, not generating revenue for Feedburner. And particularly if the publisher is a paying “pro” member. It’s just one ad now, but this is a slippery slope. Publishers invest a lot when they decide to go with Feedburner – they turn their feed URL over to them and it’s not trivial to switch away. Feedburner, perhaps more than most web 2.0 companies, needs to be very careful with trust issues.

Microsoft Live Local to Launch Thursday

Michael Arrington

Microsoft will relaunch tomorrow under , around 9 am PST. This is a continuation of Microsoft’s rebranding campaign to place online consumer services under the brand. had a briefing with Erik Jorgensen, GM of Microsoft’s new Search & Mapping group today and includes additional details on her blog. Local.live will also have new functionality. In addition to road maps and satellite views, Microsoft is beginning to integrate “birds eye” views, which are photos with significantly more detail than satellite pictures alone (see above screenshot). In addition, driving directions will be more fully integrated into the service. This is a significant improvement on the existing service as well as a rebranding exercise. I’m still a big fan of . The multi-point directions are absolutely a must have, and the constantly updating permalink saves a couple of steps when sharing a map. It does not include satellite images, however, which continues to be a drawback of the service.

Gawker Launches New Blog, Consumerist

Michael Arrington

Gawker continues to drive its busines forward amidst rumors of an acquisition in the works with the . In addition to their to promote their content within Yahoo, Gawker today the launch of its newest blog, , a humorous slant on today’s consumptive world: “We here at Gawker Media love to spend our money, but we hate being treated like cattle while we do it. And so our big happy family is proud to announce the birth of our latest site: Consumerist, our answer to the utter fuckitude of modern capitalism.” Edited by Joel Johnson, who formerly wrote Gizmodo, The Consumerist is off to a strong start with posts such as “ ” and “ “. The Consumerist has a full, ad supported and a partial, no ads .

Wall Street Journal Discusses the Rise of Bloggers

Michael Arrington

wrote about Memeorandum, Blogniscient and TechCrunch in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s an interesting column discussing the rise of blogs as “journalists” and the usefullness of blog aggregators in filtering out the most important writing. The reality is that while there are now as many tech blogs as stars in the sky, only a tiny fraction of them matter. And those that do aren’t part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world’s new elite. Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it’s not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles. While I agree with the trend that Lee Gomes is highlighting, I also think there is something even bigger going on. I agree with : There’s more going on here than the reporters being replaced by bloggers. It’s disintermediation, the thing that the Internet does to every business, art and profession that aggregates and repackages. Carl Sagan said that human beings are the cosmos gaining consciousness and studying itself. The tech bloggers are the tech community, the programmers, lawyers, investors, business managers, users, taking responsibility for their own cosmos. The reporters were necessary when you needed a million dollars to start a news “paper,” then a billion dollars to start a media empire. Now you need a laptop computer and an account on Blogger or MSN Spaces. Bloggers take friction out of the news reporting process. No editors are around to slow down the process. There are also no fact checkers, which can cause problems. However, the blogosphere tends to correct for this, and, as an ecosystem, I’d wager the blogosphere gets more things right than journalists. Anyway, it is an interesting article. Lee Gomes is one of the guys who gets it, obviously. And I just bought every print copy of the ‘Journal at the local newsstand. :-)

Ajax Desktops Won't Stop

Michael Arrington

is the most recent entrant into the crazy-crowded Ajax desktop space. Eskobo has (now) standard drag and drop modules. Everything is customizable except the adertising, which can be moved, but not removed, from the page. Why do people continue to produce these? Google and Microsoft already have compelling products, and I question whether there is even a market for this anyway. Here’s my current list of known Ajax desktops: Who am I missing?

CNET Acquires Consumating

Michael Arrington

, a dating site with tagging that I , has been . Congratulations to . I didn’t know that Adaptive Path had helped design Consumating until reading about it on blog today. I am increasingly impressed by the value that AP adds to companies that work with them.

Yahoo.icio.us? – Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us

Michael Arrington

I just got off an instant message conversation with Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us. I was asking him for any comment on the Yahoo acquisition rumors and he pointed me to the del.icio.us blog. , which has approximately 300,000 users: We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team – they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!) We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way – our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users. We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future. I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo! Competition is such a wonderful thing. Yahoo, in addition to launching a flurry of new products in the last few months (and the pace seems to be accelerating), now owns the two most important tagging properties on the web – flickr and del.icio.us. Congratulations, Del.icio.us. And Fred Wilson. And Josh Kopelman. : Jeremy Zawodny posts on the announcing the acquisition as well. “And as of today, del.icio.us is part of the Yahoo! family.”

The Favor Exchange

Michael Arrington

It’s the last business day of the year, which obviously leads me to think about last minute tax writeoffs. One of the best tax writeoffs, of course, is a charitable contribution. Then I remind myself that donating to charity isn’t just about the tax writeoff – it has the ancilliary benefit of helping others,too. :-) And that’s why I like Toronto-based , too. It’s a web 2.0 company that has the ancillary benefit of helping others. The basic system is: register and post if you need a favor or have a favor to give. Things I see on the site now include a post for a , and a for help writing a wikipedia article. After favors are completed, members are asked to make a rating of the other person. And if you help someone or are helped, the other person is automatically added to your network. Favorville is young and has very little traffic. Usually I’d wait for things to develop a little more before posting on something like this, but given the feel-good angle to the company, I’m going to point to them now. Maybe we can do them a favor, and kickstart the network.

Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn't Live Without

Michael Arrington

There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end. What I do want to write about as I reminisce about the year ending in a couple of days are the Web 2.0 companies that I love and use every day. I’ve tested over a thousand products this year, and have written about hundreds. And while some of the companies I write about get very positive reviews, I find that the only true test of the value of a product is its staying power: do I continue to use the product, and maybe even pay for it, as the days and months go by? So for those of you that are curious, here is a short list of the companies that have held my attention, and that I would not choose to live without on the web: I have a love/hate relationship with Bloglines, but they’ve recently dramatically, and I really like that I can see the number of subscribers for each feed. This was the hardest one to include on the list, but at the end of the day I couldn’t leave them off. I use Del.icio.us multiple times every day to store and retrieve bookmarks. I freely admit that there are better solutions out there and I may very well switch to of them in the near future, but you have to hand it to Del.icio.us for inventing the social bookmark phenomenon. I love the statistics Feedburner provides on feed readership and has lots of that are important to me. And despite what I’ve , I know and trust the FeedBurner team. I just wish they’d get rid of the advertisement on my feed page. :-) I enjoy Flickr more and more every day. I like seeing what my friends are up to based on the photos they upload as well as getting comments from others on my pictures. And I am starting to go back and upload old sets of photos from years ago. Flickr is just perfect. The Measure Map blog analytics tool created by Adaptive Path gives me incredible insight into who is looking at what on TechCrunch. They need to deal with the speed issue for larger blogs though (it takes minutes sometimes to pull up stats, or just breaks). Memeorandum is how I keep up on the blogosphere when I don’t have time to read all of my feeds. It has also changed what I blog about, and how. Memeorandum is a cultural phenomenon. Yeah, there are a out there, but Netvibes seems to stay ahead of the pack on functionality. The flickr stuff is great. Plus, how can I not love a service that includes TechCrunch as a default feed? :-) I’ve been waiting for forever. I forsee a day when a service like Omnidrive comes packaged with a new PC, or is offered alongside web email solutions. I’ve only had it for a few days, but I’m smitten. And fair disclosure: there are some awesome competitors out there, too, that I am just starting to look at. I listen to Pandora whenever I write – sometimes for hours a day. I’ve discovered countless new artists from it. What can I say? Along with Vonage, Skype keeps my phone bills down to next to nothing, and it is an integral part of my everyday business and personal life. I would trade application sharing for the new video feature in a heartbeat, however. I use it more than Google. No one has launched anything better, yet. And they’ve made great progress in search speed over the latter half of the year. I love WordPress. Actually, let me rephrase that statement: I love WordPress 1.5. Version 2.0 makes me want to throw my laptop out of the window. But it is an amazing piece of software, and all of my blogs run on it. I use Yahoo Maps because it allows multi-point driving instructions, something none of the others offer yet. This was incredibly useful when I had to attend three or four holiday parties on the same evening.

Rallypoint Offers an Ajax Word Solution

Michael Arrington

I’m loving the ajax office solutions tonight. In addition to , I’ve been playing around with , an online ajax word/wiki product. Rallypoint joins , , and others (I lump services like and the yet-to-be-launched in this category as well – a wysiwyg wiki and a sharable online version of word are effectively synonyms). Rallypoint has some great features, but is not as robust as Writely yet. The beta account is allowed only 2 MB of storage. And while they allow pasting from word (?), they do not have an import or export feature.. Rallypoint does have wonderful image and media uploading (with a built in player), and rich sharing/permission features. For more information on Rallypoint, check out ‘s post on the product.

JotSpot Tracker Furthers Office Online Experiment

Michael Arrington

Jotspot continues to roll out interesting, easy to use wiki products. I wrote about back in September. This week they released , a spreadsheet wiki that allows users to both import and export excel spreadsheets. As more office applications move online, JotSpot Tracker joins and the open-source in the spreadsheet space. While Jotspot Tracker is clearly the most polished of the three, funcionality is very limited and the small visable area leaves a lot to be desired. Nonetheless, this is an excellent way to collaborate on simpler, smaller spreadsheets and bypass the hassle of email and chaotic version numbers. And the inport function was flawless. From and others.

Yahoo Answers Launches

Michael Arrington

launched . The service allows any Yahoo user to ask any question and get answers and advice from other Yahoo users. The community picks the “best” answer, and everything is archived for search. There is a product tour available . A similr service, , launched earlier this year. Yahoo Answers is taking a different (and more web 2.0) approach than , which charges for answers and relies on paid experts. To incentivize users, Yahoo is creating a points system based on quality and quantity of participation. There are a number of interesting features built in, including spam flags and RSS feeds for every question. I only have one complaint. Tagging. Yahoo owns one of the best tagging sites out there – Flickr. And yet they continue to stumble on the tagging issue when launching new products. , for instance, desperately needs tagging (it will be added early next year). In this case, Yahoo Answers requries you to categorize your question under a single pre-defined category, and then choose further pre-defined sub categories. While this certainly helps structure the data for easier search, it isn’t very useful to the publisher. It would be so much easier if, like Flickr, the person asking the question could tag it with a few descriptive terms. They have an incentive to get it right, and Yahoo would quickly have rich enough data to create a virtual category on the fly as users search or browse through the listings. Making this a free, community-driven service takes it way beyond Google answers. Take the next step: ditch this impossible to maintain category system and move to tagging and dynamic, on-the-fly taxonomy.

Sponit Goes Into Private Beta

Michael Arrington

I recently spoke with one of the founders of , a new service that will be launching in the next month or so. Sponit, which is being created by three U.C. Berkeley students, is an innovative new group “blogging” platform that is quite addictive. As I’ve said before, I’m a sucker for the closed-beta, give-us-your-email page. But I’ve also had the chance to test sponit. It’s still in the very early stages, but its an interesting application and adds to the overall web 2.0 discussion.

Jookster v. Wink

Michael Arrington

‘s search engine launched yesterday. Like , Jookster is aiming to provide more relevant search results by putting user-generated bookmarked links above normal results. Unlike Wink, which allows users to add significant metadata to bookmarked pages (tags and reviews), Jookster determines relevance of bookmarked queries solely based on a keyword analysis of content on the bookmarked page. Any web page may be bookmarked, or “Jooked” by users. No additional metadata is requested at the time of bookmarking. These results are shows above normal search results on Jooked. A key part of the service is associating with friends. When you perform a search, you have the option of determining who’s bookmarks are also included – just you, friends of friends, one more level out, etc. The Jookster idea is great, but the lack of metadata associated with the bookmarks (particularly tags) means it will not return results nearly as relevant as Wink results. I also question whether users will have any real incentive to give up browser real estate to yet another bookmarklet, and bookmark pages. also writes about Jookster today.

More Video Tools – Grouper V2.0 Rocks

Michael Arrington

As I continue my journey to find the , I may have found the (near) perfect product – version 2 of which launches tonight. Grouper is only available for windows and requires a download. But it’s worth it. The product is currently free and allows unlimited uploads of photos and video. Each piece of content can be shared with the public, kept private or shared just with a select group of people. The publisher can also tag content for easy search/find later. And RSS feeds are availble for tags and publishers. Grouper is a Windows XP based application that allows users to share their personal media with the world and/or safely within private groups. With Grouper users can upload video and photo previews to Grouper.com where anyone can view them and then choose to download them via our distributed download network. Grouper also uses P2P technology to connect you directly to your friends’ hard drives where they can share large media files in a safe, encrypted environment. Grouper is a simple install and requires no firewall reconfiguration. A key feature is the ability to create your own “Groovies”, or movies. This is a set of tools which allows users to mash up various video clips, photos and music/audio, along with title pages. These basic tools, all free, give users the power to create really cool videos on the fly and share them with others. Based on the name, I suspected that Grouper was saving them in a proprietary format that could only be viewed on their website or via their client, but there is an option to download and share these files in WMV format. This is absolutely awesome. I feel as though I’ve only touched the surfact of Grouper, and I’m going to continue to test the product. They just may have set the new standard for video sharing on the web (at least for the windows platform).

Skype Video Launches

Michael Arrington

As , Skype v2.0 with video functionality before the holidays. Skype Video is available only for Windows users currently (and the compression technology they are using is , which could significantly delay an Mac version). While video functionality is great, I’d actually much prefer the ability to share applications (browser, powerpoint, excel, etc.) through Skype, making it significantly more useful for business calls. In other grumblings, ponders whether independent developers will continue to build for Skype, since they tend to subsume the better ideas (Festoon, Skylook, etc).

Outlook 12 to have RSS Integration

Michael Arrington

In news that certainly is not making the existing RSS Aggregator companies happy, Microsoft Outlook program manager Michael Affronti has that RSS will be integrated with Outlook 12. This will not only hurt the NewsGators and Attensas of the RSS space (those that have Outlook plugins to display RSS feeds). It will also impact Bloglines and others as users inevitably move their reading habits to the email client. The ability to drag stories right into subject folders, that may or may not contain emails as well, is just too useful to ignore (and that’s why I liked so much a few weeks ago). also wrote about this, and brings up a very important point. Users want RSS in many different ways (mobile, web when they are away from their home computer, etc.). Syncronization is extremely important and this may be the niche that allows existing players to survive. And I also agree with Robert when he says that RSS integration with Outlook will get millions more people using RSS.

PostSecret Book Arrived

Michael Arrington

The book that I arrived from Amazon. I spent some time going through it last night and I really like it. PostSecret is one of the more interesting Web 2.0 companies (if you can call it a company). It certainly creates conversation, evokes emotion, and merges the online and offline worlds beautifully. If you’d like to buy the book, it is available at . And speaking of books, check out . Wow, great design by .

TalkDigger 2.0

Michael Arrington

I’m a little late writing about this, but , which launched a week and a half ago, has really evolved since the original version that I . TalkDigger queries major blog (and other) search engines on a given URL and returns relevant results. Since all of the search engines vary in their results, this is the quickest way to see everything. Enhancements include more search results, more search engines, pagerank for each result, and more. I found an interesting RSS feature in the tools section, for example. And, the results UI is much more user friendly and looks like normal search results. Frédérick Giasson, the creator of TalkDigger, give a full feature overview .

Browsr Has One Interesting Feature

Michael Arrington

I first heard about in a comment to one of my posts. In some ways it’s a standard bookmarking site, but at this point lacks most of the advanced features of Del.icio.us, Shadows, Wink, etc. But Browsr does have one feature that is interesting. Bookmarks are categorized, and others can rate the usefullness of the bookmark. Browsr then creates a home page directory of the most popular categories and the highest ranked bookmarks within each category. The result is a very nice directory. I like products that take aggregated user data and do something interesting with it. In an indirect way, this reminds me of memeorandum, digg and other useful services that do the same. User date + algorithms (even simple stuff like this) can be incredibly useful.

MusicStrands Does Music Search, Too.

Michael Arrington

If isn’t for you, check out , a young company that its site yesterday. The company is based in Corvallis, OR (where is that?) and Barcelona, Spain. MusicStrands had results for every band I threw at it. Lots of stats, and links to buy music from amazon and iTunes. And it has excellent web 2.0 features as well, including social networking, recommendations and user tagging of music. They also have nice support options for small and indie bands, allowing them to get their music into the mix. Basically, MusicStrands is an excellent resource for finding new music. : points out in the that Google, unlike MusicStrands, also does lyric searches. Good point.

Google Music Search

Michael Arrington

It certainly isn’t the much anticipated Google Music Store, but to incorporate music information into normal google search results in the same way they incorporate and information. If Google recognizes the band, album or song, they will put results at the top of search. Now you can search for a popular artist name, like or the , and often Google will show some information about that artist, like cover art, reviews, and links to stores where you can download the track or buy a CD via a link at the top of your web search results page. says he found lots of obscure music, but my from college isn’t included. Google is currently linking to iTunes, Rhapsody and others to purchase music as well as reviews from select sites on the web. This is, of course, a good first step in putting together a music store. Let’s see where they go with this.

Blog Network Rankings

Michael Arrington

Blog Network Watch has a list of the , based on various metrics from Technorati, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. I’m happy to note that our very own , which is a loose affiliation of top blogs, is No. 4 on the list behind Gawker, Pajamas Media and Weblogs, Inc. Of course, it’s nice to have heavy hitters like to anchor things.

Alexa Totally Gets It, Opens Up API

Michael Arrington

has the scoop – Alexa is making its dataI available on the Amazon.com , and it’s a really big deal. Amazon’s Alexa is opening up its 5 billion web documents and 100 terabytes of data to . Included in this data are Alexa’s famous based on toolbar users. As John says, this certainly opens up entirely new classes of search engines and other applications that can be built by leveraging this data. Alexa is charging for its data, but it isn’t much. The first 10,000 requests per month are free. Thereafter, requests are charged at a rate of $.00015 each (just 15 cents per thousand requests.). For example, if you make 100,000 requests to the Alexa Web Information Service during a given month, you will be charged $13.50. Your first 10,000 requests are free, while your remaining 90,000 requests are charged at a rate of $.00015 each: .00015 * 90000 = $13.50. This is a developing story and some of the links are not live yet. More on this as things progress. : , and have more.

Get the Blogosphere's Opinion – OpinMind

Michael Arrington

Santa Clara based has a neat service that polls the blogophere for its opinion on the topic of your choice. OpinMind claims to index 1.7 million blogs today. Type in a search engine-like query (or click on popular searches like “ “) and see a result categorized into “positive” and “negative” for your query. OpinMind tries to determine whether a blog is positive or negative on the item you’ve entered based on surrounding context. And you can do a faceoff by typing two queries with a “vs.” between them. Try (Google nudges out Yahoo with a 73% v. 55% approval rating – I wonder if that will change much over time) . Or (Democrats win with a 42% approval rating v. 27% for Republicans). Statistically relevant? Not even close. Fun? Totally. As OpinMind starts tracking more blogs over a longer time, I’d love to be able to track how opinions on a given topic evolve. And while it may be difficult to build a business around OpinMind (Matt Marshall says “ “), I like tools that do interesting things with edge-based content. Maybe OpinMind, like Memeorandum, will get people thinking about new ways to do interesting things with blog and other edge content. And I do think really superb business models are there waiting, for the right idea. OpinMind was James Kim and Hongcheng (Charles) Mi. The OpinMind blog is .

Yahoo Teams with Movable Type

Michael Arrington

and have partnered to pre-install Movable Type on Yahoo’s small business hosting. Yahoo’s hosting customers will now be offered Movable Type pre-installed. This should help Yahoo move a few more hosting units, and will certainly expand the playing field for Six Apart. It’s a good deal for both companies, particularly Six Apart. And taken in a vacuum, this news is pretty damn boring. But what is exciting is how aggresively Yahoo is attacking the consumer market right now. They are that really resonate with consumers, buying web 2.0 companies and . And they are doing all of this in such a nice guy fashion. Executives are embracing and listening to bloggers and others,and the late nineties arrogance is completely gone. Yahoo is clicking on all fronts right now. Google’s arrogance and their “screw the customer” mentality is their biggest weakness, and Yahoo is taking full advantage of it. Success and humility is a pretty powerful combination.

Meebo's Impressive Growth

Michael Arrington

( ) is clearly going to be raising venture capital and/or be acquired in the very near future. I spoke with Founder Seth Sternberg yesterday about site growth and he revealed some impressive stats. Meebo is now averaging about 250,000 logins per day. On December 7, twelve weeks after launch, Meebo had 236,000 successful logins, 6,534,948 messages sent and approximately 13,069,896 total messages carried. Meebo is also asking users where they use the product, and why. The results: Where do you use meebo? Work: 59.7% School: 36.8% Home: 30.0% Internet Cafe: 7.3% Why do you use meebo? (free form answers coded) IM otherwise difficult / impossible to access: 33% Web IM is better than software IM: 18% meebo is easier: 11% I knew something was up because of the rabid comments I’ve been receiving on my – mostly students begging to find a way around school-imposed blocking of the meebo site. Here’s just one : I am not able to use meebo. I want to access yahoo and hotmail mails.Can you gibe an alternative site through i can check my mails. I want it urgently. Thanks, Amit. I’ve seen passionate user comments like these before – . Meebo’s competitors include and .

New Stuff at Basecamp

Michael Arrington

37 Signals’ announced a couple of new features yesterday and today for their popular (100,000 users claimed on home page) and useful project management product. First, Basecamp now without the need to set up your own FTP server. Files as large as 20 mb can be uploaded. Second, Basecamp has created a . If an affiliate pushes new paying members to Basecamp, the user gets credits against their Basecamp fees.

TagWorld Launches Music. The War Begins.

Michael Arrington

Over the weekend , a young, self-funded startup in Santa Monica that’s all of a month old, a music product that is turning heads. TagWorld is targeting the MySpace crowd – generally people under 25, who all want a blogging/home page presence on the web. Sites like MySpace, and Xanga are generating a truly massive number of page views – MySpace and FaceBook each rival Google in page views (although they don’t approach the reach). The reason? These users spend most of their day on these sites, updating their sites and clicking on friends. TagWorld that includes a GB of storage and great ajax tools for creating a site. And, as the name implies, tagging of everything. The new music functionality is a full generation ahead of MySpace and others. Bands can upload a GB of music and have a number of DRM options to control distrubution. Users can mix this music into their own media player and can upload their own music (and other files, like photos and movies) as well. They can create customized music playlists, store the music on TagWorld and have access to it anywhere they can get online. Users can also set up playlists that others can listen to when they visit the user’s website. All of this requires nothing but the ability to click on the music and drag the music player modue onto their site. No HTML or other technical skills are needed. Can TagWorld take on MySpace and become the King of ? Yeah, I think they will. For a number of reasons. First, the founders, Fred Krueger and Evan Rifkin, have done a great job getting top bands to start using the platform. Check out the TagWorld pages for , and . Second, TagWorld has 160,000+ users after just a month of being live. The “in” crowd is starting to notice. Third, I think the teenager/student social network doesn’t have the same lock-in that, say, ebay has. TagWorld’s target users are fickle and don’t want to be considered mainstream. They’ll try new things and if the functionality is there, they’ll stay. And this target market is constantly renewing itself as children become teenagers (new customers) and young adults move on to more professional tools (customers leave). So, in a nutshell, I’m bullish on TagWorld. And some of these features quite frankly appeal to a much larger audience than teenagers and young adults. The market for an online music locker with a portable player is wide open. TagWorld can take this market.

Gritwire – Cool Flash Reader, Stupid Launch Party

Michael Arrington

Illinois-based , a new Flash based RSS reader, today at the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco. These new Flash applications are always visually stunning, even if they are not as fast as their Ajax counterparts. GritWire is no exception – its well designed. The RSS reader is functional but not spectacular. There are OPML import options and a feed search, but images are not shown in the reader and most (all?) formatting is also stripped out. There are, however, a number of additional features, including a podcast player, alerts (I can’t seem to make this work) and a “wiki” feature. The wiki is a basic text box that can be edited by you and, I assume, your friends. It’s a nice collaboration tool (I want something like this wiki on my desktop for easy group working). The Gritwire blog is . Gritwire is hosting a big open bar launch party tonight at a San Francisco bar called The Cellar – in my opinion this was a bad idea. Expensive launch parties are very Web 1.0. Instead of throwing a party (and spending all your time asking everyone to attend), you should have just rented a room and demo’d the product for bloggers and other journalists all day. Very few people who show up for the free booze will give a damn about your product. I did, however, have a great conversation with about Gritwire at the Pluck get together this evening. My guess is he’ll write more about Gritwire tomorrow sometime. And I went home early (ignoring your party) so that I could test your product and write about it.

Meebo Funded by Sequoia?

Michael Arrington

I just got back from back-to-back (to back) holiday parties and the rumors are flying that , which I wrote about a noting their stellar growth, has closed funding from Sequoia Capital at a $10 million pre-money valuation. I have not confirmed this with the company and it could be inaccurate. That’s quite a valuation for a company that is barely 12 weeks old.

Meetro Goes Mac

Michael Arrington

, an interesting location-based instant messaging client that’s compatible with AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo!, is now alpha testing a Mac version of their software. I , If you are a Mac user and want to try Meetro, email mac@meetro.com and include your city, state (if applicable) and country of residence.

Google's Ajax Desktop is Now Extensible

Michael Arrington

I swore to myself that I wouldn’t write about for a while (and held steady even though launched), but today I’m breaking that promise, because Google just did something really cool with their customizable Ajax desktop. The desktop was and can be accessed at or by clicking on “Personalized Home” on the Google main site. As reported by , Google has released a very simple developer API to allow anyone to create and host modules that people can add to their Google homepage. The API is available . A module is an XML file and can be an extremely simple piece of code. Most of the modules have been created by Google employees at this point. The directory of available modules is . I’ve stated before that opening up the API and allowing third party modules is a great idea for just about every web 2.0 product, and ajax desktops are no exception. Microsoft did this with (directory is at ), and has a ton of third party created widgets available. Google’s home page has evolved significantly since July. In addition to news and RSS modules, users have the option of pulling in gmail links, weather, etc. It’s a useful application. On a related note, has an excellent summary of the ajax desktops out there (although it is already dated with this Google API news).

Technorati Explore Smells Like Memeorandum

Michael Arrington

Whoa. Niall Kennedy nonchalantly earlier today about Technorati’s version of Google Labs, called . It’s where Technorati is putting it’s not-fully-baked beta products. There’s only one project there now, and it’s called “ “. Explore sure looks a like it was inspired by : Find out what bloggers are saying right now on any topic, organized by how many links their posts are getting. Think of it as a newspaper front page for any subject. Give it a try! Explore is broken out into multiple categories, including Business, Fashion, Gadgets, Tech and many more. A quick look at . Posts are listed according to links in (just like Memeorandum), and links are clustered underneath the headline (just like Memeorandum). Technorati Explore is a really interesting way to see how popular blog conversations are clustering (just like Memeorandum). It’s nowhere near as real-time as Memeorandum (although Technorati is indexing the entire blogosphere whereas Memeorandum only indexes a few thousand blogs). Also, Memeorandum is advanced enough to cluster related items even when they don’t necessarily link to eachother – Technorati doesn’t do this. Finally, Memeorandum includes news items (NYT, etc.) and press releases as headlines, which Technorati isn’t doing. It works for any tag – just search on http://kitchen.technorati.com/explore/[TAGNAME], whereas Memeorandum today only has sites for politics and technology. Also, Technorati automatically includes all blogs in the conversaiton, whereas Memeorandum only includes its few thousand indexed blogs. With Technorati, even the smaller bloggers can get in on the conversation. This is not as addictive as Memeorandum. Gabe Rivera, the founder of Memeorandum, has put together an incredibly perfect interface that just keeps drawing people to his site. But its the first real competition I’ve seen in this space.

Omnidrive's Online Storage Actually Works

Michael Arrington

I’ve been talking to , the founder of Sydney, Australia based , since I posted about the in November (see no. 1 in that post). I’ve had the chance to test it over the last few days. It’s pre-beta but will be launching soon. They’ve solved a lot of the problems associated with storage away from the network, and has both an online and a desktop interface. Omnidrive will have a free version with a gig or so of storage, and paid plans after that. The feature set is awesome – it has everything you could ask for, including dealing with massive file uploads in the background. Full review coming soon – sign up for the beta announcement .

Wink Launches

Michael Arrington

The user-enhanced search engine, in for the last few months, launches Thursday morning to the world. Wink has evolved substantially since my . Wink is, at its core, a combination of traditional search with feature-rich social bookmarking. Bookmarked/tagged results appear above normal search. Search results can be bookmarked, tagged and rated from Wink. The same functionality is available via a bookmarklet that works with Firefox, Safari and IE. As a twist, users can also block “bad” pages. Lots of functional Ajax is built into the interface. Users can easily browse tag results (either their own, or all users). There are three key additional features. First, Wink has added two way synchronization with del.icio.us bookmarks. And they’ve added a “Keep Sync’d” feature that, as the name implies, maintains a constant one or two-way syncronization with del.icio.us. No word on whether they will add in other social bookmarking services over time or not. Second, Wink allows the creation of “collections”, which is a tag group (tags of tags). Collections are controlled by one user but can be shared with anyone. Third, and this feature really appeals to me, Wink has added a “Wink Answers” tab to search results. The text is a wiki – meaning anyone can edit it. For queries that have complicated results, a number of options appear. A lot of data has been pre-populated, and I believe this will be a popular feature. Like Wikipedia, it begs for user interaction, but with a lower intimidation factor. Wink is also finalizing a nice blog widget that includes additional links (that point only to bookmarks created by the blogger). See for an example. I have not had the opportunity to test this myself yet, but it looks interesting. Congratulations to Founder Michael Tanne and the entire Wink team.

FeedBurner Integrates Web Services Into Feeds

Michael Arrington

is tonight – a group of web services that can be integrated by the publisher into her/his feed. FeedFlare is located under the “Optimize” tab within the FeedBurner dashboard. FeedBurner is also releasing a full set of open APIs to allow third party developers to build and integrate customized services. Give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including as many or few of the services listed below. FeedFlare places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item in your feed, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content. If a publisher chooses to include one or more services, they appear at the bottom of the feed. Currently offered services include: I’ve added a number of these to the . Just look to the bottom of any post, within the feed or in a feed reader. The really interesting part of this announcement, however, is that FeedBurner is opening up the API and allowing anyone to build in their own services. Del.icio.us competitors, for example, can build their own version of this and promote it to publishers. Or entirely different types of applications can be built. I like having interactive services like these being built directly into the feed. has more.