Archive for March, 2007

In today’s dot com world, online search is a huge part of most websites user base, and I can say from personal experience that it brings in most of my traffic. If I wanted to I could get into the importance of targeting keywords but I think I’ll save that for another post, as today I want to talk to you about Quintura.

Quintura is a visual search engine that works sort of like a tag cloud, in that it shows you the most recent searches in tag cloud format, and even more so, you can mouse over any of the recent searches and it automatically displays the results without clicking. It also goes deeper into that search word and displays other relevant searches around the initial word you selected.

Quintura allows you to search through the web, images, and video like most search engines, but they also give the availability to search through Amazon. Your Quintura cloud can easily be saved as an easy link so you can return to it at any point, or you also have the option to send it to anyone you feel may be interested in that search.

Not only does Quintura offer a normal search, but they also offer a search for today’s more younger web users at Quintura Kids, and I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve been using that more than the normal one. Kids can easily select the different categories they are interested such as ‘Science and Nature’ & ‘Music’ and they will receive relevant searches in those subjects.

Quintura uses the Yahoo! and Yahoo! Kids XML so the same results could be found without the visual aspects, but that’s not fun at all is it?

Correction: Quintura Kids does not use the Yahoo! Kids XML, as there actually is none, it’s based off of their own search index. Thanks to the Quintura team for pointing this out to me.

Lyro can be described as an online business card directory that allows colleagues, friends, investors, etc., to easily find and connect with you. The idea is to brand yourself on the web in a simple and professional way so that you can position yourself for success in the future.

Lyro allows for an extremely easy signup process that takes about 30 seconds, and due to the fact that the service is still in Beta, you’re more or less done at this point. Unfortunately they are still working on new features and making sure that all the kinks are out.

Currently the business cards are quite bland, as they have no color, and image uploading hasn’t been uploaded yet, but both of these features are on the large list of To-Do’s for the Lyro team. Along with a subdomain on the lyro.com website in the form of domain.lyro.com, you will also be able to download your business card as a vCard, and create a badge for you to place on your websites and any additional online services you may use.

Contacting people is also a big feature that they wanted to keep simple and that they have. When someone visits your subdomain, domain.lyro.com, they will see your business card as well as a message box to easily send you a message, with a maximum of 3 messages a day from one person. We’ll have to see where Lyro takes us to really determine how useful of a service it will be.

AllPeers isn’t really a new product but it still garners respect from anyone who knows how hard it is to transfer files to friends and families via e-mail and instant messaging, and knows how difficult it can get when a file is too large for a typical e-mail client, or connectiong drops when using IM. AllPeers is a Firefox plugin only so you Internet Explorer fans are out of luck, so use this as an excuse to switch over.

Obviously due to the fact that it’s a Firefox plugin it works directly in your browser using Drag & Drop as it’s transfer model, which basicly means you can transfer any files from anywhere on your computer by simply dragging and dropping them into the plugin. This is also the same for web pages, but dragging the Firefox tab into the plugin, as well as Website images, by simply dragging the image into the plugin.

You can organize your friends into groups which allows you to easily transfer images and files by group or individually depending upon what your sending. Adding new contacts/friends is very easy by just entering your friend’s AllPeers username, or if they don’t currently have an account you can just enter their e-mail address to invite them to the service.

AllPeers is a great collaboration tool and something I would definitely use on a day to day basis when dealing with associates, because it makes sending files, and tracking those files easier then ever. Even more then just a Peer 2 Peer tool, you can chat live with any contact on your list, which provides a very unique way of staying in touch while sharing important files that you need.

A couple more things to not is that AllPeers is Open Source, so all of you developers out there can help with the production of this amazing application and make it even more powerful. Also, the team does have plans on offering the service in other browsers eventually, but it isn’t a priority at the moment.

SoWeSay is a new personaly review site allowing you to create profiles for anyone in the world, even yourself, and then you judge that person on five different categories; Trustworthiness, Likeability, Intelligence, Generosity, and Humor. When these five categories are completed you get an overall score out of 180, the scores are measured in degrees (°) as all of the scales are in a protractor like format.

Once you’ve reviewed someone you can add a note to the profile in regards to that person, good or bad, it doesn’t matter, it’s all about what you think of them after all. Badges are something that they also offer displaying your current rating with the number of times that you’ve actually been rated, with a link directly to your profile on the SoWeSay site. You may also create polls about yourself to find out more about what people actually think about you, you’ll probably only want to send this to friends or people you trust or you’re going to end up with senseless answers from people that don’t necessarily care.

They offer an SMS solution so that you can receive profile updates via Text Messages, and although this isn’t something that I’ve tested out yet, I don’t think I will be as it’s pretty straight-forward and this is something I really don’t need to be receiving text-messages about, but to include it would be a good option for those whom get addicted.

The idea behind the service is to find out more about people from others perspectives. Reviewing my friends would give me the opportunity to inform others how they are and what they are about, so if they ever met them, they would have an idea what to expect, it’s a more personal approach to Social-Networking, but I’m not quite sure if it will catch on.

Ok, so to get your backlink on this site, which is in fact a Page Rank 5 according to Google, all you need to do is write a review about Super Justin.com on your website. Once you’ve done the review, e-mail me at justin@superjustin.com with the link to the review, whether it’s negative or positive I don’t care.

All that is required is that you have a link on your review to Super Justin.com with the anchor text of Web 2.0 Reviews. Try to make it an interesting review as I really love constructive criticism, especially from my readers who make or break this blog. Also, I ask that you write a 50+ word review, but I’m not going to enforce that.

Once a week I will make a post on my blog with the sites that have reviewed Super Justin and you’ll have a backlink on Super Justin.com forever. It’s so easy right? Well what are you waiting for!

Justin.tv has been live for almost 8 days as of this writing and already has a competitor in Ustream.tv. Justin.tv is a startup by Justin Kan, you can see my full review here, and the idea behind it is to develop a video platform including camera in which people can video log their lives, if you don’t know exactly what I’m talking about then head over to Justin.tv and see for yourself.

Ustream.tv offers a similiar service but all it’s really good for is hosting the video you provide. According to the initial review over at TechCrunch, Ustream.tv launched early as they wanted to jump on the Justin.tv bandwagon which without a doubt was a big mistake. As TechCrunch stated in their review it’s buggy, and I have witnessed this first hand.

When I first went to the site it was extremely slow and I didn’t even get through the signup process before it messed up on me, I’m not even sure if my account is setup right, but anyway. The navigation is fairly simple, but very little descriptions are put into any part of the site, so I really don’t know what I’m looking at when I’m looking at it. Setting up a video feed is simple, but I did it by mistake because I wasn’t quite sure what I was setting up.

Some of the options on the site don’t allow for proper choosing, for instance, I can choose whether or not I want to designate my feed to be viewed by only Men, or only Woman, but if I accidentally choose one or the other, they don’t have an option listed for me to choose both.

It has potential if they could just correct some of the bugs on the site and maybe put it on a faster server, I mean, I could probably host my own video on my server and have the exact same speed, so really, why wouldn’t I? One thing that I will admit is that the video delay is almost 0, from my testing it’s been about 2-3 seconds behind, so it does seem to be closer to live than Justin.tv.

So let’s think about Ustream as a Web2.0 application. What’s unique about it that no one else offers? They are offering an easy application to stream live video 24/7 to their site and you can embed the video anywhere on the net that you want, not only that, but they offer a type of community on the site in which I can browse other people’s live feeds. It also has great options for networking with other member’s, so if your an agent looking for models, or a model looking for an agent, you’d be interested in checking this out.

Are they giving me a reason to keep coming back to the site? I have to go back to the site every time I want to initiate video as it has to be done from within the Member’s Area of the site, so yes, they are doing a good job at getting return visitors.

My prediction is that this service will survive, although it’s trying to compete with Justin.tv when it should be focusing on working out the kinks of it’s own service, it still has a shot in this 2.0 world, and maybe even the next-gen. For your viewing pleasure, me!

I’ll leave this up for a little while, I may or may not be there, if I’m not you can peak around my room. The video feed can also be found in the About Me page.

As more and more Web Startups are coming about you really have to think about how many of those startups will flourish into a great, popular web application, and how many will die and end up in the TechCrunch DeadPool, or even more so, what exactly is the difference between the two.

One thing we know is that it’s definitely not because of lack of skilled coders and programmers, because the world has plenty of those, and we’ve seen that from some of the great websites we have at our disposal that really help us make our daunting day-to-day tasks much easier. We also know that it can’t be for lack of graphics and cool reflection type logos because as we all know, there are plenty of those.

We need to consider the following when talking about average life of a startup. Is the application being created a valuable and necessary thing, and will we be able to use it on a day-to-day basis, or at least something that we can go back to frequently. Unlike a content-type website we need to give our visitors another reason to keep coming back.

If an application can be valuable and serves a purpose, which in-turn keeps people coming back for more, then there is a good possibility it will succeed and be alive for some time to come.

Web2.0 has had such a success for so many people, the only thing that really kills startups nowadays, are other startups that offer the same service but expand on it, making it more useful and giving visitors a bigger reason to switch over to that site and not yours. An example of this was when Google Calendar was released, it pretty much disposed of most of calendar startups already in play due to the fact it was Google, and it was integrated with Gmail.

Throughout our lives we’ve learned that planning is an essential part to everything in our lives whether we know that we’re doing it or not. Of course it’s much easier to call up a friend, make plans, and follow through with them, then it is to track a project you’ve been working on for months with 5+ other people.

As you can possibly imagine tracking, planning, and organizing a project with this many people can be difficult, but it’s needed if you don’t want people’s different jobs colliding with each other. GoPlan is a new project planning application that is simple, yet powerful, and it gives you exactly what you need to be able to track project tasks, add notes to the overall project, comment on different tasks.

GoPlan offers several different plans from the Free Plan, to an Unlimited Plan which costs $100.00. Some additional features that they offer is a live chat, SSL secured communication. Also, each plan allows for a different number of projects that can be created and a different number of people that can be added to the project.

For easy tracking of different tasks and activities, Go Plan offers what is called an Activity Timeline which is also available as an RSS feed so you can hook it in to your favorite FeedReader and easily keep track of updates that have been done to your project by any member.

Another feature I like to see is the ability to upload files to your project for easy collaboration with other members of the project. Each plan offers different disk space for different types of files, but for the most part all plans offers enough space for text files, spreadsheets, and other typical used project-related files.

Below you’ll see a comparison of plans.

When Web2.0 came about it really changed the way that most people use the internet, it brought, and is still bringing, an insane amount of online applications that most of us will use on a day-to-day basis, but we all know that it will have to end eventually. Eventually is the key word here, because we really don’t know when, or how we will enter the next generation of the internet, or even what it may bring.

Is it even possible to expand on the current web model? I believe so, and I think Justin.tv might’ve stumbled onto something that could possible bring the internet into a new era. Justin.tv provides something real, and we know it’s real because we’re watching every second of it. None of it is scripted, it’s slightly planned, but plans change too.

So this begs the question: Is the internet heading into a more real state? Will bloggers be blogging in real life situations, walking down the street, interacting with people. Now in my opinion that would lead to some pretty interesting blog posts. What types of applications could be created to accompany this new web model? Will I be able to stream my life over the internet in a few months? Who really knows, I guess we’ll just have to sit back and watch as things evolve.

The real question I have, is how long will this all last? It’s going to be really hard in the future to keep expanding on certain ideas, I mean it’ll have to end sometime, right? Web 2.0 might just be a phase or it might just be the extent of what can be offered on the web.

Google Personal Pages have been around for awhile now, allowing anyone to signup with any e-mail address and be able have a customized homepage with RSS feeds, and simple widgets that can easily be created with a little knowledge of HTML or another scripting language and XML.

Up until now you couldn’t really pretty up the interface, and all you really got was the plain white background of other Google pages. They have now added Themes to the Google Personalized pages, and although they only theme the header of the page and the CSS, it still adds a world of difference in the appeal of the pages. Google gives you the options of choosing from seven different themes including the Original bland background.

An interesting concept to these themes is that they change depending on what time of the day it is. So my theme is currently ‘Sweet Dreams’ but because of the time of day it is, it’s showing the sun over some clouds. As the time of the day changes, the theme will get darker until it is eventually night, such a simple yet neat concept.

I haven’t really used my Personalized page in a while but I’m considering using it again just due to this addition, and hopefully they will add more themes in the near future.