Sharpcast a photo sharing alternative includes synchronization with PC, mobile phone and the web. To bad it's Windows-only and in Alpha. Better get in now for free before they start charging to use. Sharpcast offers a desktop download for faster editing, uploading, and sychronization but ... It still has bugs, and it may occasionally crash or act weird. It will also blow you away with its niftiness and potential, and we canÂ’t imagine going back to a world without it. ...
Fo.rtuito.us - fortuitous adj. happening by a fortunate accident or chance. Its sort of like rolling the dice and praying you hit 7 or 11. When you sign up you are immediately referred to a person to contact and if you don't you can not move forward. So basically your stuck until the other person responds. Maybe I am being to hard on them so here is what they say about themselves:
The site is very simple, you sign up and are given a friend chosen randomly. Next, you have 4 days to get to know this person before you are asked to make a decision whether to keep them as your friend. Once you have made that choice, you are given another friend, chosen at random and the process starts all over.
What sets us apart is we don't think a picture of a persons face, or a simple profile can tell the story of them. We do things a little backwards, you get to know a person and then decide if you want to be their friend.
We feel that people usually choose their friends based on how the person looks, their ethnicity or age. This site works to prevent this. It allows people to meet others who live completely different lives.
We want people to be able to form some of the best friendships of their lives and in many cases from the least likely of candidates. We want this web-site to open their eyes to the world they're missing by not learning about others.
When you sign up you add a picture so the whole idea of not having a picture of a persons face to decide if you want to be their friend is out the door. Common sense tells you that the first thing people do is look then decide. The second issue I have about this site is the waiting period. Who in the online world wants to wait to make contact with another person. Maybe instead of just one person at random they should put five or seven people just to increase the chance of making a quicker friend. Overall the site is really simple and really boring stay away far far away.
Stylehive a San Francisco based collaborative shopping community. Sytlehive is a neat social bookmarking application that not only gives you the basic bookmarklet, title and description options but also gives you tag suggestions, photo insert, and url implementation. Right off the bat the website represent exactly what it is and how to use it without overloading the text.
CollectiveX the product of Clarence Wooten - Founder & CEO was born out of frustration from having several memberships to professional communities and receiving an abundance of meeting and event notices. Not being able to manage them all and then not being able to integrate those notices with other software programs.
StreakrWe’re a small team hard at work on changing the face of social networking for the better. As well as building a cool AJAX interface and including all the Web 2.0 features you’ve come to love, we’re also bringing a new twist to the standard social networking formula. We can’t give away too many details about these features, but let’s say they’re all about making social networking on the web a bit more like it is in the real world.
Inquisitor, the Safari and Camino plug-in that brings Spotlight to searching the web, has been ported to a web-based search engine. Upon entering a search into its pleasantly minimal interface, you will be presented with a list of search recommendations and a variety of search engines to focus on, including digg, Amazon and their A9 search, Flickr, Google, Technorati and Yahoo!.TUAW
Vyew is created by the team at Simulat and is a browser-based conferencing and always-on collaboration platform that provides instant visual communication without the need for client downloads or installations.
Vyew's multimedia workspace enables shared viewing of presentations, files, photos and one's desktop. Included are tools for whiteboarding, annotating, text chatting, and phone conferencing.
BuzzShout created by James Yu, is an online listing and repository of reviews of the hottest new companies -- the so-called "Web 2.0" companies. But, they don't want to limit themselves to that category. Any web service is fair game. The site offers wonderful social networking features like the basic user Profile, Feedback reviews, site Submission, tagging, and LogoSurf. It's still in beta but growing in users.
Mecanbe a web application that gives you a place to organize your life and give it purpose. TechCrunch has an incredible write up.
I have not yet had the chance to test this application but from looking at the homepage source code I can tell you that web standards are not the focus of this web application which makes me wonder if the technology will be interoperable. In Ouriel Ohayon article it mentions flash-based so it may not matter. Well that's all I have on this site but make sure you read the article.
ClaimID the product of a couple of North Carolina University alumni is an online identity management system. The system allows you to either manually enter know website urls that you personally vouch is true about you or use the Post to ClaimID bookmarklet for easy bookmarking of site that you approve as true about you. This is what they say about themselves:
...Imagine that you are applying for a job. You know that your prospective employer is going to search for your name online, and since you're a rational person, that worries you. How will your employer know what online stuff is actually about you, and not about that other person who shares your name? And what if the good stuff about you online doesn't mention your full name, or uses a name you no longer go by (such as a maiden name)? How would your prospective employer ever find it? Why do you have to lose out in the eyes of that employer? And the worst part is there's no way for you to easily influence what search engines say about you.Over on the ClaimID Blog you can download the podcast interview they had with Leo Laporte (leo) and Amber MacArthur (ambermac) for Inside the Net on This Week in Tech.
Enter claimID. ClaimID is a service that lets you claim the information that is about you online. That information is then associated with your name, providing folks an easy way to see what is and isn't about you online. In doing so, you get to influence the search engines, and provide people more relevant information when they search for you. It's time to reclaim some power back from the search engines. ClaimID is about letting you have some say in what search engines say about you....
Based out of London and powered by Audioscrobbler. The Audioscrobbler system is a database that tracks listening habits and calculates relationships and recommendations based on the music people listen to. Last.fm helps social communities build through music, lets say you like to listen to a certain type of music (latin) or a certain band or artist (elvis crespo) you simply type it into the search box and start listening to music related to that term. You can view what other Last.fm members are saying about the artist or music which leads to building relationships with others who share your musical interests.
The site also offers a Last.fm media player, and a chart builder plugin that you can use on your other sites to showcase what your listening to. At the moment Last.fm is beta testing a Profile + Tag Editor program to give its members a more customizable way to tag the music they listen to. Take the tour to learn more about the services which include a profile page, chart showcase, journal, groups, forums, tags, and more.
Last.fm offers a subscription for $3.00 (USD) a month to those who love music. You can become your own radio station, get extra features and benefits. You can even directly influence the social music revolution with exclusive access to Last.fm beta site.
Last.fm gives a great 1st impression and 2nd and 3rd. The interface is sweet clean and simple, I have not checked it on a cell phone browser yet but the screen is resizable and degrades beautifully on internet browsers. The ability to ad our own ads to the service requires you to pay a third party ad service that charges prices ranging from $61.25 a day to $1470.00 a month or participate in a pay per click system. Overall Last.fm focuses on music and is what a Social Music oriented community should be.
SuprGlu brought to you by Iridesco, Inc., a small design and technology studio, has created a wonderful social web application that lets you bring the pieces of your web content together into one central place for you, your friends, and maybe even your friends to-be. Ok enough with the PR crap.Besides donations or being bought by its competition I don't see how this web application will stay afloat or make any real money. I mean all its really doing is displaying the information from its main source at a new address, I must be missing something.
Other than that the service is a great idea and useful as hell, but the page loading maybe a potential problem depending on how much media is being presented. The source code is a little messy but still search engine friendly. If you're a designer/css hacker, you can grab the CSS package and create a stylesheet of your own. You can easily paste in your stylesheet later in the Settings:Edit stylesheet screen. The SuprGlu's blog contains great information on how you can use its service to better your online presence.
Overall I highly recommend this for any Web Socialite out there. You can visit my SuprGlu site (working progress) to see how it works.
A bloggers dream is to be able to find quality and relevant content to blog about. Here enters a newly launched Sphere the search blog engine. Sphere is a three part engine you enter your keyword click search and your serp (search engine result page) comes up. On the right side of the page you find three buttons - Blog Search Results, Featured Blogs beta, and Related Media.Blog Search Results "relevance" are based on three key factors: links in/out of blog; meta data around the blog so its the blog post you search and not the website its on. Within the result page you can search by a time space using a measure slider much like Measure Map slider. The other neat thing about the results is a profile link where you can check various information such as average number of posts, the average number of words a post has on the blog site.
Featured Blogs beta is to showcase the most relevant blogsites with the term you have searched for. The difference here is the posts are not displayed but the blogsite itself with the number of posts relevant to your term. On the left side of the result you will find a plus sign and when you click it will display the basic bios of the blog posts. The profile link here will show you a full page bio of the blogsite.
Related Media is a great place to find solid materials such as books, photos, news, and podcasts related to the term.
In all the area you are given a suggest link where you can submit a blogsite that relates to the term. Of course Sphere will check it before actually including it.
Overall the site looks great, clear directions, and big font. Afterall it was designed by Adaptive Path. With the added value of a downloadable widget you can't go wrong here. Since it just launched I haven't had enough time to test and review it to recommend. I can say I will be personally using it very much.
Over at Techcrunch Michael Arrington, who I am pretty sure was the first person to announce the first review of Sphere, has a great interview with two the founders of Sphere.
Squidoo is not your average community in fact it's more like an online mall. Let me explain why. When you signup with Squidoo you become a "lensmaster" (shopkeeper) and are able to create "lens" (storefronts).
A lens is one person's view on a topic that matters to her. It's an easy-to-build, single web page that can point to blogs, favorite links, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, Google maps, eBay auctions, CafePress designs, Amazon books or music, and thousands of products from hundreds of other trusted merchants. You can pick whatever content you want to put in your lens to bring context to your topic. Then, when someone is looking for recommended information, fast, your lens gets his started and sends him off in the right direction...Read more at the Squidoo FAQ page.
Creating a lens is easy to do and simple to setup. When you start a lens your are asked to create a unique url (ie "http://www.squidoo.com/addictivesearchjunkie") give it a title, add some topic tags, select user friendly or adult content. Write a short bio for your visitors to relate to, select how you want to get paid. Which by the way you can donate to a charity or straight cash or a combination. Then you are asked what type of lens are you creating, All-Purpose, All About You, $$, Blogger, How-to, News of the Wierd, Newshound, and Custom. Once you've selected the lens type your page is automatically setup via a template, but don't threat you can add or delete what you want or don't want.
The modules you can add to your lens vary from Cafepress, Digg, eBay, Technorati to Amazon, Flickr, and RSS Feeds give lensmasters greater abilities to market. You can build link lists to your favorites, sell your products, promote your blog or company or even yourself. You can make money buy selling products from eBay, Cafepress, Amazon all from your lens. Squidoo is a third-party player where it takes a share from the sells it generates from your lens. Squidoo pay out through PayPal so will need to have a paypal account to get paid.
This gives its members great opportunities to make a buck, promote their products, services, and share information. Best of all its free to use. Some of the Modules are are a little tricky to grasp for beginners. You made need to setup accounts with modules such as eBay and Cafepress to effectively make sales. Luckly SquidU the Squidoo University gives its masters a place to learn the trade secrets of Squidoo. Overall this site is great for anyone looking to startup a storefront.